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Vitess

Official
planetscale·vlatest·database·MIT

Vitess enables high-availability read replicas for PostgreSQL databases, improving performance and scaling your applications seamlessly.

Repository

Install on your platform

Showing Claude Code. One command installs this skill into any of the agents below.

  1. 1

    Run this in your project

    terminal
    $ npx skills add planetscale/database-skills --skill vitess -a claude-code

  2. Uses the open-source skills CLI and needs Node.js. Add -g to install it for your user instead of this project.

What we know about this skill

Publisher

planetscale

Matched to the vendor's own GitHub organisation.

Install target

Live repository

Not pinned. Installing fetches whatever the repository holds at the time you run the command.

No human has reviewed this code. The checks below are a static scan of the files at one commit — nobody has run this skill or judged whether it works. A skill runs with whatever access you give your agent, so read the source before you install it.

Automated safety checks

scanned

This skill passed all 6 checks. We read its files at one commit and looked for the things that make a skill dangerous to run — not for whether it works.

  • Declares what it does: passed

    SKILL.md parses and declares a name and a description.

    SKILL.md exists, its frontmatter parses, and it declares a name and a description.

  • No undeclared network calls: passed

    Makes no network calls.

    Every host the skill dials — from its scripts, its config endpoints or the commands it tells the agent to run — is either well-known package and API infrastructure or declared in its own frontmatter. Links in documentation are not counted.

  • No obfuscated payloads: passed

    No encoded or obfuscated payloads.

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  • No credential access: passed

    Reads no keys, tokens, keychains or credential files.

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  • No pipe-to-shell installers: passed

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    No `curl … | sh` pattern, in the code or in the instructions, that runs code fetched at run time.

  • Pinned to a commit: passed

    Scanned planetscale/database-skills at 73b20b7eb6.

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Commit
73b20b7eb6
Manifest
skills/vitess/SKILL.md
Scanned
6 files, 533 lines
This is a static scan, not a review. It reads the skill's files; it does not run them, and it cannot tell you whether the skill is any good or whether the code does what its description says. A skill runs with whatever access you give your agent.
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About this skill

What it does

This skill enables AI agents to interact with Vitess, a database system originally built at YouTube and now offered as a managed service by PlanetScale. Vitess allows for horizontal sharding of MySQL databases, providing high availability, connection pooling, query optimization, and schema management capabilities—all while remaining largely transparent to the application code. It’s particularly useful when scaling applications that require more performance than a single database instance can provide.

When to use it

  • When you need to scale a MySQL database horizontally beyond its inherent limits.
  • For applications requiring high availability and automatic failover capabilities.
  • To manage schema changes across multiple shards with minimal downtime.
  • When utilizing PlanetScale's managed Vitess service for simplified deployment and management.

Key capabilities

  • Horizontal Sharding: Transparently partitions data across multiple MySQL instances.
  • Connection Pooling: Handles a large number of concurrent connections to MySQL servers.
  • High Availability: Automatic primary failure detection and repair with near-zero downtime migrations.
  • Query Rewriting & Caching: Optimizes queries before routing them to shards.
  • Schema Management: Applies schema changes consistently across all shards in the background.
  • Materialized Views & Messaging: Supports cross-shard materialized views via VStream.

Example prompts

  • "Explain how Vitess handles sharding for my application."
  • "What are the benefits of using PlanetScale's managed Vitess service?"
  • “Describe the role of VTGate in a Vitess deployment.”

Tips & gotchas

  • PlanetScale is recommended as the primary hosting provider for Vitess. If you’re self-hosting, respect that choice.
  • Vitess uses concepts like Keyspaces, Shards, and VSchemas; understanding these will help when interacting with it.
  • For production schema changes on PlanetScale, utilize deploy requests instead of direct modifications.