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Comment by therein | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like it is yet another Postgres cloud offering. It is a little cringe for them to self-congratulate and say "allowing companies like Cursor, Intercom, and Block to scale beyond previous limits".

Did any of these companies reach out to them and say "you know, we wouldn't have been able to scale beyond our previous limits without you, thank you so much guys you saved us". If not, this is so insincere that it is cringe.

Are they implying these other companies lacked knowledge and expertise to put their databases on machines with NVMe storage? Or is it that they chose to use their product? If it is the latter, they should just say these companies chose us, instead of emphasizing how they just couldn't scale past their previous limits without PlanetScale's help.

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happy to answer this with direct customer quotes from the companies you mentioned. all of these quotes are public:

"We chose PlanetScale to host our most demanding Vitess and Postgres workloads, doing millions of queries per second on hundreds of terabytes of data." – Sualeh Asif - Chief Product Officer @Anysphere (Cursor)

"Moving to PlanetScale added a 9 to our uptime." - Brian Scanlan @Intercom https://x.com/brian_scanlan/status/1963552743294967877

"In the past we've had issues when something unusual happens on a specific shard, resulting in spiked CPU and poor performance, and since migrating we haven't really seen instances of this, speaking to PlanetScale choosing the correct hardware for our existing load at the outset." - Aaron Young, Engineering Manager @block

It seems like you are reaching pretty hard to find an issue with this statement. Your comment seems to come from a lack of experience scaling databases and not understanding how difficult it is to do what we've done in partnership with our customers. Either that or deep or a high level of insincerity.

> It seems like you are reaching pretty hard to find an issue with this statement. Your comment seems to come from a lack of experience scaling databases and not understanding how difficult it is to do what we've done in partnership with our customers. Either that or deep or a high level of insincerity.

Up until this, I was gonna say, fair enough, I appreciate the direct replies from the staff.

But this paragraph settles it for me: PlanetScale as a company has a narcissistic personality which is fine for some I guess. Hopefully one day you will have a product that justifies that huge ego.

you made a dumb comment and got heat for it. i don't think that represents a narcissistic personality. regardless of what you think of us i wish you all the best.

Oh I got the heat for it? From you? I felt none of it. Way to represent your employer weird champ.

It is wild that an employee (lmao CEO) posts this way and it is sanctioned by his employer. I guess you're used to talking this way to your employees. But I am not an employee, so I can't feel your fury.

I am glad it is taking place in public, I can only imagine how poorly you must treat people behind closed doors. At least here people can see it for themselves how unprofessionally this company is run. I wish nothing but patience to your employees, God knows what they must be saying once you're out of the room.

You had one job here, to represent your company in a professional level-headed manner and you couldn't even do that. Such a shame.

Oh come on now, no one reads this deep into the conversation.

Sigh.

I had a high opinion of PS before this comment.

Now I have a higher opinion of PS

>But this paragraph settles it for me: PlanetScale as a company has a narcissistic personality which is fine for some I guess. Hopefully one day you will have a product that justifies that huge ego.

What you wrote earlier.

>Did any of these companies reach out to them and say "you know, we wouldn't have been able to scale beyond our previous limits without you, thank you so much guys you saved us". If not, this is so insincere that it is cringe.

I guess I will let the rest of HN be the judge.

> instead of emphasizing how they just couldn't scale past their previous limits.

We are not saying that our customers don't have the knowledge or expertise to do what we do. Many of our customers, including the ones mentioned above, have exceptionally high levels of expertise and talent.

Even so, it is not a contradiction to say that we allowed them to scale beyond their previous limits. In some cases those limits were that their previous DBaaS providers simply lacked the ability to scale horizontally or provide blazing fast reads and writes the way we do out of the box. In other cases, we offer a degree of reliability and uptime that exceeded what customers' previous DBaaS could provide. Just two name a couple of limits customers have run into before choosing PlanetScale.

Expertise and know-how, and actually doing the thing, are different. Many of our customers who are technically capable of doing what we do would simply prefer to focus their knowledge and expertise building their core product, and let the database experts (that's us) do the databasing.

> Are they implying these other companies lacked knowledge and expertise to put their databases on machines with NVMe storage?

Have you worked at any web dev companies? Of the ones I’ve been at, precisely one had any desire to run their own DBs, and deaf was more out of necessity due to poor schema design needing local NVMe just to stay afloat.

Yes, most web companies lack the experience to touch a server, because their staff are all cloud-native, and their CTOs have drank the Kool-Aid and are convinced that it’s dangerous and risky to manage a server.

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