Making MySQL faster

In this episode, I chat with Richard Crowley from PlanetScale about their new offering: PlanetScale Metal. We dive deep into the performance and reliability trade-offs of EBS vs. locally attached NVMe storage, and how Metal delivers game-changing speed for MySQL workloads. Database School: https://databaseschool.com PlanetScale: https://planetscale.com PlanetScale Metal: https://planetscale.com/blog/announcing-metal Follow Richard: Twitter: https://twitter.com/rcrowley Website: https://rcrowley.org Follow Aaron: Twitter: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarondfrancis Website: https://aaronfrancis.com - find articles, podcasts, courses, and more. Chapters: 00:00 - Intro: What is PlanetScale Metal? 00:39 - Meet Richard Crowley 01:33 - What is Vitess and how does it work? 03:00 - Where PlanetScale fits into the picture 09:03 - Why EBS is the default and its trade-offs 13:03 - How PlanetScale handles durability without EBS 16:03 - The engineering work behind PlanetScale Metal 22:00 - Deep dive into backups, restores, and availability math 25:03 - How PlanetScale replaces instances safely 27:11 - Performance gains with Metal: Latency and IOPS explained 32:03 - Database workloads that truly benefit from Metal 39:10 - The myth of the infinite cloud 41:08 - How PlanetScale plans for capacity 43:02 - Multi-tenant vs. PlanetScale Managed 44:02 - Who should use Metal and when? 46:05 - Pricing trade-offs and when Metal becomes cheaper 48:27 - Scaling vertically vs. sharding 49:57 - What's next for PlanetScale Metal? 53:32 - Where to learn more