PlanetScale

PlanetScale is a serverless MySQL-compatible database platform built on Vitess, the same technology that powers YouTube and Slack at massive scale. Its defining feature is database branching: create branches of your database schema just like git branches, make changes, and merge them back with non-blocking schema migrations that never lock your tables or cause downtime. This fundamentally changes how teams manage database changes, replacing risky migration scripts with a safe, reviewable workflow. PlanetScale provides horizontal sharding under the hood, automatically distributing data across multiple nodes as your database grows. Connection handling uses a connection pooling proxy, eliminating the serverless connection limit problem that plagues traditional MySQL. The platform includes query analytics showing slow queries and their frequency, insights into index usage, and recommendations for optimization. PlanetScale offers read replicas in multiple regions for global low-latency reads and automatic daily backups with point-in-time recovery. Their Boost feature caches query results at the edge for sub-millisecond response times. While PlanetScale shut down their free tier, the Scaler plan at $39 per month provides 10GB storage and 1 billion row reads, offering excellent value for production applications.