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.
Featuring
Sponsors
Buildkite – You deserve better CI. Buildkite is engineered for frontier scale and trusted by the teams setting the pace.
WorkOS – Auth for CLI with AuthKit from WorkOS — Bring secure browser-based login to your terminal apps using the OAuth Device Flow, with the same polished AuthKit experience plus SSO, MFA, and passkeys. Learn more at WorkOS.com and AuthKit.com
Coder.com – Secure environments where devs and agents work in parallel. Open by design. Secure by default.
Fly.io – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps close to your users — global Anycast load-balancing, zero-configuration private networking, hardware isolation, and instant WireGuard VPN connections. Push-button deployments that scale to thousands of instances. Check out the speedrun to get started in minutes.
Notes & Links
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
Talks and prior episodes
Chapters
| Chapter Number | Chapter Start Time | Chapter Title | Chapter Duration |
| 1 | 00:00 | It's The Changelog! | 01:19 |
| 2 | 01:19 | Sponsor: Buildkite | 02:44 |
| 3 | 04:03 | Sam is an old friend | 09:08 |
| 4 | 13:11 | Agents optimizing databases via MCP | 05:07 |
| 5 | 18:18 | Deploy requests and safety gates | 01:33 |
| 6 | 19:51 | Neki: Sharded Postgres arrives | 04:36 |
| 7 | 24:27 | Whether to open source Neki | 04:59 |
| 8 | 29:26 | Capitalism and breaking up big tech | 04:12 |
| 9 | 33:38 | Sponsor: Coder.com | 03:06 |
| 10 | 36:44 | Open source the crown jewels? | 01:37 |
| 11 | 38:21 | Moving fast and making mistakes | 07:47 |
| 12 | 46:08 | It's been a year for Adam (buying out a partner) | 04:51 |
| 13 | 50:59 | Competing with Amazon's scale | 02:21 |
| 14 | 53:20 | Bare-metal on the hyperscalers | 07:13 |
| 15 | 1:00:33 | Sponsor: WorkOS | 02:15 |
| 16 | 1:02:48 | Silicon Valley and stolen secrets | 04:58 |
| 17 | 1:07:46 | X/Twitter as a lead source | 07:45 |
| 18 | 1:15:31 | Out-engineering with the Postgres benchmark | 04:50 |
| 19 | 1:20:21 | The minimalist website story | 02:02 |
| 20 | 1:22:23 | Supabase, multigres, and competition | 06:36 |
| 21 | 1:28:59 | Building Neki with AI | 06:44 |
| 22 | 1:35:43 | MySQL versus Postgres | 01:38 |
| 23 | 1:37:21 | Grateful to be back | 03:10 |
| 24 | 1:40:31 | So much glazing | 00:17 |
| 25 | 1:40:48 | Closing thoughts and stuff | 01:28 |