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Neki 是 PlanetScale 推出的全新分片式 Postgres 产品，旨在帮助团队突破单机扩展数据库的限制。凭借多年管理大规模 MySQL 集群的实战经验，PlanetScale 开发了 Neki，让用户能够将 Postgres 数据分布到多台机器，同时保持与标准 Postgres 驱动、 ORM 和连接字符串的兼容性。 Neki 在每个分片上都运行真实的 Postgres（而非自研存储引擎），因此能够完整保留现有扩展和 SQL 功能。

Neki 的核心架构由四部分组成。 Neki routers 负责接收和路由流量，充当解析查询、生成分布式执行计划并汇总结果的网关；每个 shard 由一个主库和分布在不同可用区的多个副本构成，以保证高可用性；通过 sidecars 实现的智能连接池可实时监测各个 Postgres 实例的实际承载能力，从而更高效地调度流量；最后由 control plane 负责全局健康管理，协调故障转移、模式变更和数据重分片等操作。

用户通过 data topology 管理数据分布，这是一份用 shard keys 定义的 JSON 配置，用来把逻辑表映射到物理分片上。这样的灵活性让团队可以先采用标准的非分片 Postgres 部署，只有在性能成为瓶颈时再迁移到分片模型。平台将这些扩展操作作为在线内置工作流来处理，因此诸如 schema 更新或版本升级等通常需要大量停机的操作，用户可以在不中断应用的情况下完成。

除了分片能力外，Neki 还集成了 PlanetScale 的成熟功能，例如 database Insights 、自动架构建议和分支工作流，旨在为那些已超出单机限制但又不想放弃标准 Postgres 体验或自行管理复杂应用级分片的组织提供平滑的迁移路径。

Neki 目前处于平台预览阶段。公司鼓励用户了解其架构和功能，但建议在此阶段不要在关键生产负载上运行，因为可能会有破坏性变更。感兴趣的用户可以登录 PlanetScale 账号选择加入预览，并查阅文档获取有关集群设置与配置的详细技术说明。 Neki is a new sharded Postgres offering from PlanetScale, designed to help teams overcome the limitations of scaling databases on single machines. Drawing on years of experience managing massive MySQL clusters, PlanetScale developed Neki to allow users to distribute their Postgres data across multiple machines while maintaining compatibility with standard Postgres drivers, ORMs, and connection strings. Because it uses real Postgres on every shard rather than a custom storage engine, it preserves full support for existing extensions and SQL functionality.

The core architecture of Neki relies on four distinct components. Neki routers manage incoming traffic, acting as a gateway that parses queries, builds distributed plans, and aggregates results. Each shard consists of a primary database with multiple replicas across different availability zones to ensure high availability. To handle traffic efficiently, Neki utilizes intelligent connection pooling via sidecars that monitor the actual capacity of each Postgres instance. Finally, a control plane manages the health of the entire system, coordinating tasks like failovers, schema changes, and data resharding.

Users manage the distribution of their data through a data topology, which is a JSON configuration that maps logical tables to physical shards using defined shard keys. This flexibility allows teams to start with a standard, non-sharded Postgres deployment and transition to a sharded model only when performance needs demand it. Because the platform treats these scaling operations as online, built-in workflows, users can perform tasks that would otherwise require significant downtime, such as schema updates or version upgrades, without taking their application offline.

In addition to its sharding capabilities, Neki provides users with access to established PlanetScale features like database Insights, automated schema recommendations, and branching workflows. This integrated approach is intended to provide a seamless transition for organizations that are outgrowing the constraints of a single machine but do not want to sacrifice the standard Postgres experience or manage the complexity of manual application-level sharding.

Neki is currently available in a platform preview, and while the company encourages users to explore its architecture and capabilities, they advise against running critical production workloads on it during this phase due to the likelihood of breaking changes. Prospective users are invited to sign into their PlanetScale accounts to opt into the preview and consult the documentation for further technical details on how to set up and configure their clusters.