Preview feature feedback: @prisma/adapter-planetscale / PlanetScale Serverless Driver support

[janpio]

Support for the PlanetScale Serverless Driver is in preview behind the driverAdapters preview feature.

Please share your feedback about @prisma/adapter-planetscale released in v5.4.0 in this issue.

• If you encounter a bug, please open a bug report in this repository.
• If the feature is working well for you, please share this in a comment below or leave a 👍 on this discussion.
• If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask them in the Prisma Slack community

[Murtatrxx]

Finally

[JClackett]

Can I ask what the purpose of this package is/what does it solve? just wondering if it's useful for me. I'm currently using planetscale and have a Remix app running on vercel, to combat the cold start times, im using the Accelerate console and using the @prisma/client/edge import. Would this replace the need to use the Accelerate console?

[JClackett]

Okay, good to know! in that case maybe i'm missing the point of the planetscale adapter? what's the difference if I just pass the planetscale db url into prisma or pass it via the adapter? just that it uses HTTP instead of TCP?

[janpio]

Yes, and that it talks to the PlanetScale equivalent of Prisma's Accelerate.
Before, using the PlanetScale serverless driver was not possible with Prisma, now it is.

[JClackett]

Ah yeah, so we get the benefits of the serverless connection pooling via planetscale, just not edge ready prisma client yet. Will see if the cold starts become a problem again and if so may move back to accelerate

[rwieruch]

@JClackett thanks for your questions and @janpio thanks for all the responses! I'd curious if you have seen any performance improvements regarding cold starts @JClackett ? I am in a similar position where I am using Next + Vercel Edge Runtime + Primsa/Edge/Client + Data Proxy (predecessor (?) of Accelerate) to get Prisma running on the edge.

[JClackett]

@rwieruch Haven't fully quantified it yet tbh but in general I do feel like it's a lot better using the planetscale driver to manage connections compared to the regular prisma connection mechanism. Maybe slightly worse cold start times compared to using accelerate + edge client, but having to manage two database urls (DATABASE_URL + DIRECT_URL) + the pain of developing with a local database when using the edge client has made be stick with this adapter for now! I've even bailed on using vercel edge runtime because it wasn't that much quicker for me, plus deploy times went from 1min to 7min!

[Alekzv9]

FYI: if you are using pscale cli to connect

pscale connect DB BRANCH
DATABASE_URL='mysql://127.0.0.1:3306 ...

It won't work. You need to use the full connection string

[janpio]

Workaround for what exactly? If I understood @Alekzv9 he posted a workaround: use the full connection string.

[Alekzv9]

Yes, this is the workaround.

If I try to use the planet scale cli it throws the following error

library: 'SSL routines',
    function: 'ssl3_get_record',
    reason: 'wrong version number',
    code: 'ERR_SSL_WRONG_VERSION_NUMBER'

[janpio]

I think the planetscale CLI might not provide the endpoint for the PlanetScale serverless driver, it needs a proxy in front of the normal database. You might want to ask PlanetScale what their process for local testing is.

[mattrobenolt]

Hi there, for local testing, I've poked around with https://github.com/mattrobenolt/ps-http-sim but haven't gotten much feedback so it's been a bit difficult to finish this off and get it in more hands, but it's intended to work with a local mysqld running on your local.

I am also working on allowing HTTP connections in pscale connect, so that's also WIP for the meantime.

As mentioned, with this being HTTP and not TCP, it's brought some challenges getting this exposed in all the right places. Likely this will be enabled with a flag to pscale connect --http=8080 or something to enable it, but nothing as of yet.

[dani-mp]

Hey, folks. I'm experiencing this right now and found this thread. Has there been any progress on this? The dx of connecting to the different branches with the PlanetScale CLI and then doing npx prisma studio is pretty neat, wouldn't enjoy losing that.

[shiyuhang0]

Is there any mechanism to add custom adapters with driverAdapters preview feature?

[janpio]

Not a documented and supported (as in: we guarantee we do not just break it between versions) one. But the adapters of course are just Typescript and JavaScript code and use an API that is publicly accessible, so in theory you can look at how the current adapters are implemented, write your own variant, and use it as adapter when creating a PrismaClient instance.

(We might make this an official API with a stable surface later after we have stabilized it via our own adapters.)

What database driver are you interested in writing an adapter for?

[shiyuhang0]

I work for TiDB Cloud and want to add TiDB Cloud serverless driver.
It's okay to add adapters by Prisma official at the beginning. But I think contributing adapters by database vendors will be a more suitable way if it is possiable, and we are willing to contribute ours when the adapter mechanism is built.

[Jolg42]

For context prisma/prisma-engines#4342

[ceddybi]

@janpio @Jolg42 let's say you want to create a custom adapter for a database like Couchbase, does it require to write custom adapters in both rust and typescript?

[hmbrg]

Does using this serverless driver mean I can use Prisma in any serverless/edge environment today?

[JClackett]

No, all this does is change from TCP to HTTP when connecting to the database. If you want it to run on the edge, you'll have to use prisma accelerate (paid soon). This will work with regular nodejs serverless though, just with a worse cold start time!

[janpio]

It's a bit more nuanced @JClackett.

TLDR: Not yet, but soon.

Prisma can already be used in serverless environments like AWS Lambda or Vercel Serverless Functions with your normal database driver, and now with Driver Adapters like this on. Prisma Accelerate can be a solution for when you hit problems caused by the nature of how serverless scales (= many, many connection pools at the same time).

For Edge Function environments like Cloudflare Workers or Vercel Edge Functions, currently you can only use Prisma via Prisma Accelerate and @prisma/client/edge. The release of Driver Adapters is the first step to bring us to being able to allow usage of Prisma Client directly. Our classic database drivers use TCP, which is not available or just via some experimental approaches - so we needed to develop support for HTTP based drivers first (like this one from PlanetScale). Now we can focus on making it possible to run Prisma Client directly there, using these Driver Adapters.

Follow this issue for updates: #21394 And if you have not, please fill this survey and let us know which deployment providers your are most interested in: https://pris.ly/survey/driver-adapters-github

[kylegwalsh]

Based on your comment @janpio, this adapter does not allow us to remove any custom Lambda layer logic for AWS yet?

Driver Adapters currently still need and use the full query engine, as you would use when you used the native driver and talked to the database directly

As an example, this project shows how a layer needed to be created in order to leverage Prisma in a Lambda environment previously: https://github.com/jetbridge/sst-prisma/blob/master/stacks/layers.ts

[janpio]

The example you linked shows how a Lambda layer can be used. You can totally deploy Prisma Client to AWS Lambda without the use of a separate Lambda layer.

But the query engine, which the layer separates from the rest of the application mainly, is still required, yes.

[michaelhays]

Troubleshooting tip for those who are having an issue with connecting to the database: Check the database host you're using. If it's in the format of abcd1234.us-east-2.psdb.cloud, try creating a new database password and check that the host is instead aws.connect.psdb.cloud.

So for clarity, your DATABASE_URL should look like this:

mysql://user:password@aws.connect.psdb.cloud/database?sslaccept=strict

not this:

mysql://user:password@abcd1234.us-east-2.psdb.cloud/database?sslaccept=strict

Credit to this comment for pointing me in the right direction.

[Jolg42]

@SevInf just did the official patch release, you can now use https://github.com/prisma/prisma/releases/tag/5.5.1