CORRECTING and REPLACING PlanetScale Boost Solves Cache Invalidation – ‘One of the Two Hardest Problems in Computer Science’ – Letting Users Accelerate Specific Queries by Up to 1000X

‘The first cache you don’t have to invalidate’ improves query performance with a single click from PlanetScale Insights

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PLANETSCALE BOOST SOLVES CACHE INVALIDATION – ‘ONE OF THE TWO HARDEST PROBLEMS IN COMPUTER SCIENCE’ – LETTING USERS ACCELERATE SPECIFIC QUERIES BY UP TO 1000X

‘The first cache you don’t have to invalidate’ improves query performance with a single click from PlanetScale Insights

PlanetScale, the serverless database innovator powered by MySQL and Vitess, today announced PlanetScale Boost, a new product that improves query performance by up to 1000X and eliminates the need for external database caching. Developed at PlanetScale in less than six months, PlanetScale Boost adds to the competitive advantage that customers have when they build on top of PlanetScale, eliminating weeks of infrastructure and custom application work.

Unlike other platforms that leverage off-the-shelf open source technology or build complex infrastructure to mimic this effect, PlanetScale Boost is novel technology based on cutting-edge research applied to solving real-world problems. Sitting next to, but apart from, the database, it operates transparently with no transactional overhead and none of the risk to stability of the platform that traditional caches introduce.

“As a wise person once said, ‘There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.’ The reason this has never been done before is because query caching is very difficult,” said Nick van Wiggeren, vice president of engineering for PlanetScale. “PlanetScale Boost is the first cache you don’t have to invalidate, because it's not technically a cache. PlanetScale materializes the data for boosted queries in a data structure that lets us break down the query into the fundamental pieces, allowing us to keep and update the data that you use right in memory to serve parts of those queries very, very quickly.”

PlanetScale Boost, which leverages VStream technology from Vitess, is accessed easily from PlanetScale Insights in the web UI, providing an easy flow for picking and choosing the most important queries that need to execute faster. Selected queries are automatically accelerated behind the scenes until they are deselected.

It eliminates days or weeks of engineering time often spent working to accelerate slow web pages for mission critical applications, replacing them with a simple click of a tab in the PlanetScale UI. It also eliminates the endless hours of custom coding required to implement and maintain traditional caches, providing a one-click solution without the need to change a single line of code. Priced on a per-query basis with costs similar to the traditional caches it replaces, PlanetScale Boost gives engineering teams increased flexibility and the ability to focus on building their businesses faster.

“PlanetScale Boost is the most significant innovation since our schema revert feature, and is another of the features that differentiates PlanetScale from any other database on the market today,” said Sam Lambert, PlanetScale CEO. “If you want an automatic query optimization system that will keep just the data you need in memory, invalidated automatically to speed up your queries – and who doesn’t? – you simply have to use PlanetScale.”

For more information, or to sign up for the limited beta, please visit the PlanetScale website here.

About PlanetScale

PlanetScale is upending the database industry with a true serverless experience that takes the headache out of database management. PlanetScale Rewind, database imports, branching, sharding and non-blocking schema changes increase developer velocity while reducing database fragility and ensuring production databases never have downtime. PlanetScale is built on battle-tested Vitess, a graduated CNCF open source project used by GitHub, HubSpot, Slack and Square to serve millions of queries per second. PlanetScale reduces time-to-market for new applications and eliminates the cost and effort of managing database infrastructure. PlanetScale is backed by a16z, SignalFire, Insight and Kleiner Perkins and is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. To learn more, visit planetscale.com or find PlanetScale on Twitter @planetscaledata.