[lizztheblizz]

To be clear, this is not a Vitess/PlanetScale-specific opinion or choice. Foreign key constraints are a bit of a controversial topic in large-scale MySQL environments in general, which is the greater context in which this design decision was made by the Vitess team.

PlanetScale's (and Vitess') non-blocking schema changes rely on open source tools for MySQL like pt-online-schema-change and gh-ost, which are widely used in production environments everywhere, and neither of them are too comfortable supporting FK's, though pt-osc does accommodate them to some extent (https://www.percona.com/doc/percona-toolkit/3.0/pt-online-sc...). gh-ost's lack of support was discussed on HN previously here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16983620

A good collection of resources on why they're considered problematic and many companies designing large-scale MySQL schemas tend to drop them can also be found here: https://federico-razzoli.com/foreign-key-bugs-in-mysql-and-m...

[Jarwain]

Do you know if foreign keys tend to be a problem on postgresql as well?

[lizztheblizz]

I don't have nearly the experience in Postgres environments to have seen the same level of real-world impact there, but a quick search presents me with the following documentation, which seems to indicate mostly similar performance challenges related to the use of Foreign Key Constraints: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/13/populate.html#POPULATE-RM...