Traditional database schema migrations are imperative and stateful, making them fundamentally different and more complex than stateless code deployments.
Vitess was created at YouTube to solve massive scaling problems by enabling horizontal sharding for MySQL and running it on Borg, the predecessor to Kubernetes.
Unlike modern Git workflows, database schema changes often require manual review processes and can cause production downtime due to table locking and data dependencies.
Tools like GH-OST use shadow tables to apply schema changes to a copy of the table, sync ongoing writes, and perform an atomic cutover without locking production.
PlanetScale introduces database branches for isolated development and deploy requests, which function like pull requests for reviewing and merging schema changes safely.
A live demonstration shows how to create a new repository from a template and use a GitHub Action to automatically provision a new PlanetScale database.
This demo illustrates creating a pull request for a code change and then using a chat command to automatically create a corresponding database feature branch with a new schema.
The demo concludes by showing how to review, approve, and merge a database deploy request directly from GitHub comments, triggering a non-blocking migration.
A summary of additional Vitess capabilities is followed by a Q&A session covering data residency, subquery performance, and deployment synchronization.
29:49Lian Li
26:53Matthias Niehoff
24:19Johannes Haux
36:09Chad Carlson
50:02Liviu Costea
39:15Rob Richardson
56:19Pawel Piwosz
25:24Florian Trieloff
Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.
Sector Nord AG
Oldenburg, Germany
Peter Park System GmbH
München, Germany
SYSKRON GmbH
Regensburg, Germany
