DBaaS Migration Speedrun: PlanetScale to Timescale Cloud Jacob Prall
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March 13, 2024
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2 min read
Summarize this article with:
Recently, PlanetScale announced the end of their free hobbyist tier. Many users may be looking to migrate their PlanetScale data to another DBaaS provider. While Airbyte doesn’t currently have a PlanetScale source, or a Timescale Cloud destination, I wanted to test if the vanilla MySQL and Postgres connectors could do the job out-of-the-box, with no additional work required.
And, for fun, I timed myself. Ready, set, go!
The Speedrun The Source
First, I spun up a PlanetScale instance . It was easy to do, and all of the credentials I needed (host, username, password) were provided immediately. After entering a credit card and saving the credentials, I downloaded the PlanetScale CLI and seeded my database with a single table, ‘users’, and a single user.
Total time: 124 seconds
The Destination
Okay, the source side was done. I quickly hopped over to the Timescale side of things. Setting up my database (ie “Service”) took a little longer than I expected. It was a small UI issue - I couldn’t create a service until I added a payment method. There was a banner telling me to input a payment method, but the banner wasn’t super noticeable, so I sat there clicking a disabled button toggling options for ~60 seconds. (Update: I just learned that adding a payment method is only required after your free trial expires. I used an old Timescale Cloud account - new users don't have to add a card!) After that hiccup, I saved the provided credentials and used psql to connect to Timescale from my local and create a new table - ‘users’.
Total time: 307 seconds
The Connection
The last step was to create a connection in Airbyte. I set up a MySQL source with my PlanetScale credentials, then a Postgres destination with my Timescale credentials. When it came to creating the connection, everything just worked. My data transferred in a few seconds and landed, safe and sound.
Total time: 430 seconds
Conclusion While I was really hoping to complete this little challenge in under 5 minutes, I ended up with a respectable ~7m 16s. DBaaS providers who offer products built on open-source DBs try to expose instances of their offering with the same interface as the OG open-source DB. This allowed the Airbyte connectors to work without any issue.
I recommend testing smaller workloads before relying on the vanilla MySQL / Postgres connectors to move your prod databases, but cool to see that with minimal setup, you can see results.
Now, it’s time to spin down that PlanetScale service and explain the $40 bill to my manager.
Until next time!
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