horizontal-scaling
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PlanetScale
PlanetScale is a San Francisco database company that turns the hard parts of running relational databases at scale into a managed cloud service. Founded in 2018 by the creators of Vitess - the MySQL-sharding system built at YouTube and later used by Slack, GitHub and Square - the company sells a serverless database platform known for non-blocking schema changes, branching workflows borrowed from Git, and, more recently, Metal instances built on locally-attached NVMe drives. In 2025 it extended the same platform to Postgres, chasing the fastest-growing part of the database market while still, in its own words, loving MySQL.
Cockroach Labs
Cockroach Labs builds CockroachDB, a distributed SQL database engineered to survive failures the way its namesake insect does. Founded in 2015 by three ex-Google engineers, the company combines the horizontal scalability of NoSQL with the strong consistency and PostgreSQL compatibility of a traditional relational database. CockroachDB powers mission-critical workloads at banks, retailers, gaming platforms, and AI companies that need to stay online through outages, scale across regions, and keep data inside specific jurisdictions for compliance.