Listen "Vitess for Postgres, with the co-founder of PlanetScale"
Episode Synopsis
Sugu Sougoumarane, co-creator of Vitess and co-founder of PlanetScale, joins me to talk about his time scaling YouTube’s database infrastructure, building Vitess, and his latest project bringing sharding to Postgres with Multigres.This was a fun conversation with technical deep-dives, lessons from building distributed systems, and why he’s joining Supabase to tackle this next big challenge.Sugu’s Vitess videos:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yOjF7qhmyY&list=PLA9CMdLbfL5zHg3oapO0HvtPfVx6_iJy6The big announcement:https://supabase.com/blog/multigres-vitess-for-postgresDatabase School:https://databaseschool.comFollow Sugu:Twitter: https://twitter.com/ssougouLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sougouFollow Aaron:Twitter: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancisLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aarondfrancisWebsite: https://aaronfrancis.com - find articles, podcasts, courses, and more.Chapters:00:00 - Intro1:38 - The birth of Vitess at YouTube3:19 - The spreadsheet that started it all6:17 - Intelligent query parsing and connection pooling9:46 - Preventing outages with query limits13:42 - Growing Vitess beyond a connection pooler16:01 - Choosing Go for Vitess20:00 - The life of a query in Vitess23:12 - How sharding worked at YouTube26:03 - Hiding the keyspace ID from applications33:02 - How Vitess evolved to hide complexity36:05 - Founding PlanetScale & maintaining Vitess solo39:22 - Sabbatical, rediscovering empathy, and volunteering42:08 - The itch to bring Vitess to Postgres44:50 - Why Multigres focuses on compatibility and usability49:00 - The Postgres codebase vs. MySQL codebase52:06 - Joining Supabase & building the Multigres team54:20 - Starting Multigres from scratch with lessons from Vitess57:02 - MVP goals for Multigres1:01:02 - Integration with Supabase & database branching1:05:21 - Sugu’s dream for Multigres1:09:05 - Small teams, hiring, and open positions1:11:07 - Community response to Multigres announcement1:12:31 - Where to find Sugu
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