Heroku's new, free PostgreSQL 9.1 development database | Hacker News Reader

Heroku's new, free PostgreSQL 9.1 development database

postgres.heroku.com

94 pointschanks25 comments

It looks like Heroku's dropping the larger shared database offering ($15/month for 20 GB). That's... disconcerting. That means their cheapest production database now is the Ronin for $200 a month, but I have an app going into production soon that won't need anywhere near that much power.

The shared 20gb plan (based on the older, Postgres 8.3-based architecture) is still available, as is the free 5mb shared offering. We won't replace these until this new development plan is out of beta. Once we do we will continue to have a database plan at or near this price point. Stay tuned.

Matt Soldo (Product Manager, Heroku Postgres)

Thanks, Matt. Can you share what the dev plan's row limit is? The blog post doesn't say.

We haven't determined the limit yet. Our goal is that it is more than enough to evaluate the heroku platform and to develop and test on, and high enough that any of the existing shared:5mb databases can migrate to it without worries.

It will very likely be on the order of 10^3.

Looking forward to hearing the features the "database plan at or near this price point" will have. We would love to be able to connect to our database with other apps besides the main one - even if it ended up somewhere between the $200/month plan and the $15/month - it would be incredibly useful.

I want that too.

In fact, on my todo list is to research the other database providers for Heroku to see if any of them offer this capability.

This is awesome. Had been really bummed about the lack of direct psql access for the shared database. Thanks Matt and co.!

Just a clarification - I was kind of requesting a feature, hoping that the new plans will work that way.

Thanks for the feature request. Attaching multiple apps to one DB is something we've wanted to do for quite a while...

FYI, you can hack this by provisioning a database on one app, then manually setting the DATABASE_URL config var on a second app to match that of the first app.

Time to switch to a db add-on provided by a third party?

Try: https://addons.heroku.com/justonedb or https://addons.heroku.com/cleardb

I downvoted this, but I wish I hadn't, because the links more than make up for the trite comment. If you haven't checked out the Heroku Add-ons in a while, as was the case with me, it's worth a look!

What reason would you have to switch because of this? It seems like an enormous improvement.

My response was based purely on the parent poster's comment: "It looks like Heroku's dropping the larger shared database offering".

The rep from Heroku hadn't added his clarification yet.

I should have been more skeptical. Apologies.

If you can work with MySQL, then you'll get a much cheaper plan with a reserved instance of Amazon's RDS.

Besides being MySQL under the hood, which has known flaws compared to PostgreSQL, with Amazon RDS you get to be completely worry free. You can also do backups on Amazon's S3 and setting up a replicated slave is literally just a push of a button.

I wonder if this will come with some smaller production plans between dev and Ronin. We're also in the situation of getting enough performance out of the shared db offering and not needing the power of Ronin yet.

Also, I'd hope they will give a few months warning before flipping the switch completely, similar to how the hoptoad/airbrake switch went.

> Also, I'd hope they will give a few months warning before flipping the switch completely, similar to how the hoptoad/airbrake switch went.

Funny you should say that, as I was involved in the hotpoad/airbrake transition and am now involved in the Heroku postgres one. The transition will be as smooth as we possibly can, no data will be lost, there will be plenty of time to move your data, and easy ways of doing so.

We are really excited about offering a development and free 9.1 postgres service, a huge step forward from the current 8.3 shared database service, and are looking forward to moving people over to the new instances.

We will certainly have a deprecation / transition period between the existing shared db plan and the new development plan that will give users ample opportunity to migrate their data. Safely preserving data is our number one priority, so this will be handled carefully.

I realize that the shared databases weren't really designed for production, but I used them for many projects in production, and they worked great. They included free backups, so I just took snapshots often and figured if they zapped one, I could just reload the data. The lack of backup on these new free ones kind of sucks.

I appreciate what they are doing, but this is a step back for how I utilize Heroku.

Likewise. I asked about something between dev and the $200/mo. Ronin plan on twitter and received a rather snarky reply about how I was assuming there wouldn't be other plans announced in the future.

Maybe it's just me, but if you're going to announce the depreciation of a solution at a TBD date with no indication of what the advanced warning period would be, and this is the only thing you announce along side that, I think it's fair for people to ask about the gap they see. The announcement of any planned non-dev plans should have been right alongside the announcement that removes functionality; otherwise anxiety is a given.

Keep in mind that the dev databases have Continuous Protection (https://postgres.heroku.com/#protect), and manual backup plans work on them as well.

Good to know! Thanks

This is great because if you watch Heroku outages the shared database is down more than anything else. Now my staging environment will be up as often as production.

To clear up a potential misconception, the availability characteristics of the new dev plan will probably be about the same as before. It is just that historically Heroku has had a hair-trigger about reporting any shared database being offline, a practice that continues now.

Besides considerably better production/dev parity in the higher-level paid plans versus the aging shared Postgres 8.3, the biggest feature I'm excited about is being able to connect directly to the shared database such as via "psql". One can also run pg_dump/pg_restore directly to their local environment, which for development purposes with small amounts of data can result in drastically faster backup/restore cycles between one's computer and Heroku than what PGBackups can provide.

Disclaimer: I work for Heroku, on data stuff.

How do you migrate your apps?

PGBackups https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/pgbackups

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