Connect PlanetScale Postgres to Excel, Sheets and AI

This is PlanetScale Postgres, not PlanetScale MySQL

PlanetScale spent years as the Vitess company, so it is worth being blunt about which product this card connects to.

• This connector is for PlanetScale Postgres — the managed Postgres service on .horizon.psdb.cloud. It speaks the Postgres wire protocol and the agent connects to it with Npgsql.
• It is not for the Vitess-backed MySQL service. There is no preset for that, and a MySQL connection string from PlanetScale will not fit this card.
• The connection is saved as PostgreSQL with PlanetScale kept as the badge. There is no connection type called PlanetScale — which also means a plain Postgres connection you made earlier to a .horizon.psdb.cloud host will pick up the branding on sight.
• Everything downstream is ordinary Postgres: schemas, types, and public as the default schema in a cross-source reference.

PSBouncer is the default, and the port is what decides

PlanetScale runs its pooler on the same hostname as the direct endpoint, one port along. The card defaults you to the pooled one because that is where PlanetScale points you.

• Direct is port 5432. PSBouncer — PlanetScale's transaction pooler — is port 6432 on the same host. Nothing else changes between them.
• On 6432 the agent turns prepared statements off and stops resetting the session on close. A transaction pooler can hand you a different backend between statements, and a driver that assumes otherwise fails in ways that look random.
• The port is what triggers that, not the dropdown. The dropdown exists so the card can refuse to let the two disagree: pick pooled with the wrong port, or direct on 6432, and it tells you before you save rather than after the first odd failure.
• There is no separate pooled hostname to remember and no second set of credentials. Change the port, and that is the whole switch.

The username has a dot in it, and it matters

Two of the four fields are easy to get subtly wrong, so the card checks both.

• PlanetScale usernames take the form postgres.<database-id>. Paste one without the dot and the card stops you, because the part after the dot is what selects the database.
• A password with leading or trailing whitespace is flagged. It is a clipboard artifact and it fails as an ordinary authentication error, which sends people looking for the wrong problem.
• Anything that is not a Postgres connection string is rejected with a message naming where the right one lives, rather than being half-parsed into the wrong fields.
• The pasted string is never stored. It is read once to fill the form and then dropped, so the password lives in one place rather than two.

-- Ordinary Postgres, read-only, through PSBouncer or direct
SELECT   c.name,
         COUNT(o.id)   AS orders,
         SUM(o.amount) AS revenue
FROM     public.customers AS c
JOIN     public.orders    AS o ON o.customer_id = c.id
WHERE    o.placed_at >= now() - interval '30 days'
GROUP BY c.name
ORDER BY revenue DESC;