🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Oh, fantastic. Just what my pager needed. Another announcement about a database that will finally solve scaling, delivered with all the breathless optimism of a junior dev who’s never had to restore from a backup that turned out to be corrupted. “$5 single node Postgres,” you say? The process is “now complete”? I’m so glad. My resume was starting to look a little thin on “Emergency Database Migration Specialist.”

A production-ready single-node database. Let that sink in. That’s like calling a unicycle a “fleet-ready transportation solution.” It’s technically true, right up until the moment you hit a pebble and your entire company lands face-first on the asphalt. But don't worry, you get all the developer-friendly features! You get Query Insights, so you can have a beautiful dashboard telling you exactly which query brought your single, non-redundant instance to its knees. You get schema recommendations, which will be super helpful when you’re trying to explain to the CEO why a single hardware failure took the entire "production-ready" app offline for six hours.

My favorite part is the casual, breezy tone about scaling. “As your company or project grows, you can easily scale up.”

Oh, you can? You just go to a page and click “Queue instance changes”? I think I just felt a phantom pager vibrate in my pocket from the last time I heard the word 'easy' next to 'database schema change'. Let me tell you what that button really does. It puts a little entry into a queue that will run at 2:47 AM on a Tuesday, take an exclusive lock on your users table for just a smidge longer than the load balancer's health check timeout, and trigger a cascading failure that brings me, you, and Brenda from marketing into a PagerDuty call where everyone is just staring at a Grafana dashboard of doom.

And you can “switch to HA mode” with another click? Incredible. I’m sure that process of provisioning new replicas, establishing a primary, and failing over is completely seamless and has absolutely no edge cases. None at all. Unlike that "simple" migration to managed Mongo where the read replicas lagged by 45 minutes for a week and no one noticed until we started getting support tickets from customers who couldn't see orders they'd placed an hour ago. Good times.

But the real kicker, the chef’s kiss of corporate hubris, is this little gem right here:

This means you can start your business on PlanetScale and feel at ease knowing you'll never have to worry about a painful migration to a new database provider when you begin to hit scaling issues.

I’m going to get that tattooed on my forehead, backwards, so I can read it in the mirror every morning while I brush the taste of stale coffee and regret out of my mouth. Never have to worry about a painful migration.

• We heard that from Heroku Postgres before we hit their row limit and had to do a three-day logical dump.
• We heard that from Compose.io right before they were acquired and sunsetted our entire plan.
• We heard that from the CTO who insisted a self-hosted CockroachDB cluster was "infinitely scalable" until we found out our query patterns were the exact opposite of what it was optimized for.

And when you outgrow their vertical scaling and HA setup? Don’t worry! They’ll soon have Neki, their sharded solution. Soon. That’s my favorite unit of time in engineering. It lives somewhere between "next quarter" and "the heat death of the universe." So when my startup gets that hockey-stick growth in Q3, I’ll just be sitting here, waiting for Neki, while my single primary node melts into a puddle of molten silicon. And what happens when Neki finally arrives and it requires a fundamentally different data model? Oh, that won't be a migration. No, that'll be a… an 'architectural refactor.'

So go on, sign up. Get your $5 database. It’s a great deal. I’ll see you in eighteen months, 3 AM, in a Zoom call with a shared terminal open, dumping terabytes of data over a flaky connection. It’s not a solution. It’s just a different set of problems with a prettier dashboard. Same burnout, different logo.