Postgres at PlanetScale (Interview)

Sam Lambert is back after 4 years and he does not hold back! We cover $5 PlanetScale Postgres, the Neki “do-over” of Vitess, agents shipping schema changes through deploy requests, rolling back a 500TB table in seconds, and the very real question of whether to open source any of it. Plus: why he thinks the sleeping, lazy giants should be broken up.

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Featuring:

• Sam Lambert – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, X
• Adam Stacoviak – Website, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mastodon, X

Show Notes:

PlanetScale products and features

• PlanetScale Postgres
• PlanetScale Metal
• Neki
• Vitess
• Database branching
• Non-blocking schema changes
• Deploy requests
• Schema reverts
• Database Traffic Control
• Query Insights
• PlanetScale MCP server
• PlanetScale Skills
• Benchmarking Postgres

Databases and infrastructure

• PostgreSQL
• MySQL
• NVM Express (NVMe)
• Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL Limitless Database
• Amazon Web Services
• Google Cloud

Companies and tools

• Cursor
• Y Combinator
• Kick
• Square
• Cash App
• GitHub
• Pierre
• Salesforce
• Supabase
• Multigres

Talks and prior episodes

• Sam Lambert: Agents and Infrastructure — Cursor Compile 2026
• Making the last database you’ll ever need — Founders Talk #85
• Bringing Vitess to Postgres — Changelog Interviews #651

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!