PlanetScale Rewind Is the Database Industry’s First “Easy Button” to Quickly Undo Bad Schema Migrations With Zero Data Loss

New capabilities greatly reduce downtime and alleviate the stress of making changes to production databases

PlanetScale, the serverless database powered by MySQL and Vitess, announced PlanetScale Rewind, an “Easy Button” to undo schema migrations that enables users to recover in seconds from changes that break production databases. PlanetScale Rewind lets users almost instantly revert changes to the previous healthy state without losing any of the data that was added, modified, or otherwise changed in the interim.

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“Improving the developer experience, and thereby the organizational velocity, is one of the top priorities we’re hearing from enterprises today”

Today’s announcement builds on other industry-first capabilities introduced by PlanetScale, including serverless database branching, sharding and a managed cloud offering for companies with regulatory requirements and compliance constraints. Since launching in November, PlanetScale signups have grown 160% quarter over quarter, with new customers including the world’s fourth largest podcast platform in addition to SoundCloud, Solana, MyFitnessPal and many others.

“PlanetScale Rewind gives users the ability to undo a bad migration just as easily as you undo a typo,” said PlanetScale Vice President of Engineering Nick Van Wiggeren. “So, instead of having to go restart the entire process, imagine if you could just click a button – like Control-Z – and get it back to where it was when you started but, notably, without losing a byte of data. This has never been done before, in any context, in any language, with any other database in the world.”

While numerous databases in the past have made it appear that they were doing what PlanetScale is announcing today, they were actually only reverting to snapshots, and losing all of the data that had been ingested in the meantime. The process often took hours and cost companies millions of dollars in downtime. PlanetScale Rewind builds on the platform’s best-in-class migration framework that already lets users safely conduct zero-downtime migrations, and applies a set of patented Vitess-based mitigation techniques – VReplication – to safely revert changes in seconds with a new deploy request.

“Improving the developer experience, and thereby the organizational velocity, is one of the top priorities we’re hearing from enterprises today,” said Stephen O’Grady, Principal Analyst with RedMonk. “But while large strides have been made in improving the application development tooling, the experience of using databases has lagged behind. What PlanetScale is announcing today is aimed at doing just that: improving the developer experience of using a database.”

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PlanetScale, which currently serves hundreds of millions of queries a day across thousands of databases, is built atop Vitess, the peerlessly-powerful open source database orchestration layer that underlies YouTube, Slack, Square and Airbnb. PlanetScale is a developer-first database requiring no knowledge or selection of all the usual cloud zones, cluster sizes, and other database-centric details that others require and that increase complexity for developers. It accelerates companies’ success by being both the best choice for developers on day one, and the most scalable choice when they hit hyperscale. PlanetScale customers include GitHub, New Relic, Slack, MyFitnessPal, Square, Affirm and Community.com.

“The introduction of PlanetScale Rewind is personal for me,” said PlanetScale CEO Sam Lambert. “Early in my career I was in my first week with one of the top companies in tech and I, having been assured that all was safe, made a change that took the whole platform offline for two hours. There’s simply no worse feeling in the world, and there was also a real business impact. That PlanetScale now allows you to undo that with just a keystroke is simply a miracle for legions of DBAs and for developers of all types. PlanetScale Rewind builds on our commitment to reducing the pain that DBAs face and to letting organizations of every size, from single engineers to the Fortune 50, focus solely on building the next big thing.”