Database School Vitess for Postgres, with the co-founder of PlanetScale
Jul 1, 2025
Sugu Sougoumarane, co-creator of Vitess and co-founder of PlanetScale, discusses his journey from scaling YouTube's database to his latest project, Multigres, aimed at sharding in Postgres. He shares insights on intelligent query parsing, preventing outages, and the evolution of Vitess. Sugu reflects on personal growth during his sabbatical and the significance of community in developing user-friendly database solutions. With a focus on small team efficiency, he explores how they tackle challenges in distributed systems and the ambitions for enhancing compatibility and performance.
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Origins of Vitess at YouTube
- Sugu's co-creator solved YouTube's DB issues by writing a detailed spreadsheet of problems and solutions in a coffee shop.
- They decided to build a proxy layer between apps and MySQL to protect the DB and manage connections intelligently.
Vitess as Intelligent Proxy
- Vitess began as an intelligent connection pooler parsing queries to block harmful ones.
- This proactive approach prevented database outages by filtering bad queries before they reached MySQL.
Automatic Query Limits Saved YouTube
- To protect YouTube from expensive queries, Vitess automatically added limits to queries without them.
- This stopped queries fetching huge numbers of rows, preventing major outages from going to 250,000+ video fetches.