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Neki by PlanetScale

2026-09-10 | original

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Why This Matters

PlanetScale is bringing its Vitess-style horizontal sharding playbook to Postgres with Neki, a router, sidecar, and control-plane layer that sits in front of real Postgres shards. That matters because Postgres has become the default database for new apps, but scaling it beyond one machine has typically meant custom sharding code or a proprietary fork. Neki promises online resharding, coordinated schema changes, and zero-downtime imports behind a standard Postgres endpoint, so teams can grow without rewrites or maintenance windows.

Key Takeaways

Each shard is unmodified Postgres, with Neki adding routing, connection pooling, and a control plane rather than forking the database.
Operations that usually require downtime—resharding, splitting hot shards, schema changes, version upgrades, and imports—are handled as online workflows.
PlanetScale targets scale far past a single machine (hundreds of millions of QPS, petabytes), with cross-shard atomic transactions still listed as coming soon.

Worth a Look

PostgreSQL: Up and Running (O'Reilly book) — If Neki's horizontally sharded Postgres has you curious about the engine underneath, this O'Reilly guide is a practical, hands-on tour of Postgres features, indexing, replication and administration. It's a great desk reference for anyone designing schemas that may one day need to scale across shards.

See PostgreSQL: Up and Running (O'Reilly book) on Amazon → Affiliate link — we may earn a commission on purchases, at no extra cost to you. Product picked by AI based on this article; it is not a tested recommendation.

Each shard is real Postgres. Neki adds the router, sidecars, and control plane needed to scale Postgres horizontally.

Move data to a new shard layout while the database stays online. Rebalance capacity without application rewrites or maintenance windows.

Split hot shards as workloads grow. Neki creates new target shards, catches them up with replication, and moves traffic through topology changes.

Scale Postgres past the limits of a single machine to hundreds of millions of QPS and petabytes of data.

Define how data maps to shards, shard groups, and shard indexes. Placement is explicit, reviewable, and built for controlled resharding.

Run each shard as a highly available Postgres cluster across availability zones. Failures stay isolated to the smallest possible unit.

Assign different tables or workloads to different shard groups. Scale hot, cold, or isolated data on the hardware profile it needs.

Pool connections inside the sharded database layer. Neki routes with awareness of topology, shard health, and session state.

Run schema changes as coordinated workflows across shards. Neki applies the right method per shard and tracks progress through cutover.

Let the platform track health, promote replicas, and update routing. Applications keep using the same Postgres endpoint.

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Explore topics: neki planetscale postgres sharding horizontal scaling