Scaling MySQL with Vitess · MySQL Macedonia Meetup

🐬 We’re very excited to welcome an international speaker to the MySQL Macedonia Community Meetup for the very first time! Matthias Crauwels is joining us in person to share practical lessons from sharding real production workloads.

Join us at Base42 this November for two sessions on scaling MySQL with Vitess, from a beginner’s introduction with Igor Donchovski to best practices from the field with Matthias. Discover how Slack, GitHub, Cash App, PlanetScale and many more run hundreds of shards behind a single connection string.

Agenda

Vitess for Newbies: Scaling MySQL the YouTube Way

Igor DonchovskiPrincipal Database Consultant

When I started learning Vitess, I expected it to be complex and hard to grasp. What surprised me was how approachable it is and how many powerful features are built in. From automatic failover and high availability, to transparent query routing across shards, online schema changes without downtime, and VReplication for moving data seamlessly. Vitess handles challenges that typically require complex tooling in traditional MySQL environments.

In this session, I’ll walk through Vitess from a newcomer’s perspective: what I learned, what I wish I had known earlier, and how easy it is to explore these advanced capabilities even as a beginner.

Sharding MySQL with Vitess: Best Practices from the Field

Matthias CrauwelsEnterprise Support Engineer

Sooner or later, a single MySQL server isn't enough. Vitess lets you shard MySQL horizontally, but how well it works comes down to decisions you make early, and some of them are hard to undo. This talk walks through those decisions in the order you'll face them. You'll see how to pick a sharding key, which vindex to use and when a lookup vindex is worth its write cost, and how to design a VSchema that keeps related rows on the same shard. We'll also cover why not every table needs sharding, and when copying small tables to every shard pays off.

From there we'll look at query patterns that avoid scatter queries and cross-shard joins, how to read VEXPLAIN, and how sequences replace autoincrement. Then comes the move itself: MoveTables from unsharded to sharded, Reshard as you grow, and VDiff and traffic switching for a safe cutover. Along the way I'll share anonymized lessons from supporting production Vitess clusters at PlanetScale, from bad key choices to cutover surprises. Whether you're new to Vitess or already run it, you'll leave with a practical checklist for sharding MySQL.

Join us

24 November 2026 · 18:00–20:00 CETBase42, Rimska 25, Skopje

🎟️ Free entry, but registration is mandatory.