We saw that many developers were using SQLite (or MySQL) on their local machines, but Postgres on Heroku. This led to frustrating and hard to diagnose bugs and behaviors in their apps. Our hypothesis is that easier local install will lead to more widespread usage for the technology.
Let me try to articulate my point, but I could probably use some help:
I suspect that the sort of developers who were writing apps and using SQLite locally but deploying with Postgres were the sort of developers whom will still use shaky and poor development and deployment practices regardless of whether or not Postgres is available to them locally.
Orthogonally, I think that the kinds of developers who will actually take the time to follow best development and deployment practices probably wouldn't want to use an app like this - not because it isn't a nice and helpful app, but because they probably want to install the full always-on server bundle via 'brew'.
That's my guess anyway. Does this mean the app was a bad idea? No, definitely not. But I don't personally expect a huge uptick in Heroku deployment quality because of it. At least it definitely won't be for lack of trying!
No doubt this app will appeal to the more casual developers. When the low-end of Dell is a 4-core x86-64 with more memory than most people will ever need, most non-casual developers who need to write code specific to a given database will have it starting up on boot.
Postgres performs and behaves differently too. Developers will be more conscious of vacuuming and analyzing their DBS, especially after large deletes, etc.
Overall it removes friction, regardless of how trivial, and helps commoditize the whole development and deployment cycle which is essentially herokus entire value proposition.
I say great work.
This. I'm just getting started playing with Heroku as a hobby. I've not used Postgres before, so getting things set up correctly on my dev machine was not a "install one app, go" kind of experience. I spent at least an hour reading / trying / understanding. Having something like this would have meant 1 more hour of making, rather than trying to get Postgres setup.
For hobby (or any) projects, 1 extra hour doing what I want to do is a big deal. I'm only able to spend about 5 hours per week on my hobby, getting 20% of my time last week back would have been a big deal to me.