What 'Project Hail Mary' teaches us about the PlanetScale vs. Neon debate

原始链接: https://blog.alexoglou.com/posts/database-decisions/

Neon, a database service frequently praised, particularly by Planetscale's CEO and on X/Twitter, emphasizes scalability. This reminds me of a quote from Project Hail Mary where a character acknowledges the inefficiency of a database designed for scale compared to one optimized for performance. This highlights a key truth in distributed system design: there are always trade-offs. While Neon excels at scalability, other database solutions, like Planetscale, might prioritize different aspects such as query performance (QPS). The online "drama" around these choices often overlooks this fundamental principle. As engineers, we should remember that no single solution is universally optimal; the best choice depends entirely on the specific needs and priorities of the project. Focusing solely on one metric, like scalability, without considering the broader context can lead to misguided comparisons.

Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitloginWhat 'Project Hail Mary' teaches us about the PlanetScale vs. Neon debate (alexoglou.com)10 points by konsalexee 2 hours ago | hide | past | favorite | 3 comments crims0n 2 minutes ago | next [–] Tangentially related, is this book worth the hype? I don't read a lot of genre fiction, but make exceptions for the exceptional (just finished and loved Flowers for Algernon, as an example).replychubot 7 minutes ago | prev [–] Hm I feel like I jumped into the middle of something and don't understand the conclusion.What's the beef between PlanetScale and Neon? Benchmarking, uptime, vibe coding?The quote at the end doesn't really help me. Which one is good for what?replysinnickal 5 minutes ago | parent [–] Edelman PRreply Consider applying for YC's Fall 2025 batch! Applications are open till Aug 4 Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact Search:

Lately I have been observing the constant picking of Neon, mainly I presume for its performance from Planetscale’s CEO, and the X/Twitter community.

Here are some of the many tweets I have encountered, but I didn’t save them, so a simple search resulted on the following list, just to get the gist of it.

This post is going to be extremely short, and it was just something that struck me when I read this phrase from Project Hail Mary, when Stratt, Grace and Redell had a discussion around growing Astrophage at scale:

“As a ~~breeder~~ database system it’s horrible,” I said. “Way less efficient and far lower ~~yield~~ QPS than my system … . But he didn’t design it for efficiency. He designed it for scalability.”

There is profound wisdom in this imaginary discussion, and it is a reminder, there are no free lunches in distributed designs. Both are winners, Planetscale and Neon, in their own niche and for their own use cases.

I know negativity and drama in X/Twitter brings the eyeballs, but its a friendly reminder to my fellow engineers that there is no universal optimal solution.