What 'Project Hail Mary' teaches us about the Planetscale vs. Neon debate
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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.
According to @PlanetScale , neon is the second-ranked PostgreSQL provider.https://t.co/alJavPFVBg pic.twitter.com/CqhGJb81gG
— Tak (@taekminkim) July 4, 2025
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.
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