GoKawiilPlanetScale launches Neki, a horizontal sharding layer for Postgres
PlanetScale introduced Neki, a system that adds a router, sidecars, and control plane on top of standard Postgres to enable horizontal scaling across many real Postgres shards. It supports online resharding, shard splitting, high-availability clusters per shard, topology-aware connection pooling, and coordinated schema changes without downtime.
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Postgres has traditionally struggled to scale horizontally without third-party tooling or major application rework, pushing large-scale users toward NewSQL databases or complex custom sharding. Neki's approach of keeping each shard as unmodified Postgres while automating rebalancing and failover could let teams retain Postgres compatibility while reaching much larger scale, easing a common infrastructure bottleneck.
- Neki lets Postgres scale horizontally across shards while staying online and application-compatible.
- It automates shard splitting, rebalancing, failover, and schema migrations without maintenance windows.
- Cross-shard atomic transactions are planned as a future capability, alongside zero-downtime imports and version upgrades.
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.Source: neki.dev, 2026-09-10
Published there as: “Neki by PlanetScale”
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