Heroku announces support for 17 new Postgres extensions | Hacker News Reader

Heroku announces support for 17 new Postgres extensions

postgres.heroku.com

87 pointsselenamarie28 comments

I was hoping for postgis when I saw the title . Hopefully that's coming soon.

We do currently have a public beta for PostGIS (https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/is-postgis-available) though it is only available on certain plans and is not yet GA like the other extensions.

Once PostGIS is out of beta, will it be available on dev/Kappa/Crane? (I tweeted @heroku about this, but never got a response)

Are there any plans for PostGIS 2.0 support? Would make me very happy!

Here's a tutorial for postgres + postgis on dotCloud: http://docs.dotcloud.com/services/postgresql/

Since the dblink extension is available even on the free dev plan, is anything stopping you from creating a bunch of dev databases and linking them together to overcome size restrictions? Sounds kinda fun, although there will of course be concerns over performance, integrity constraints, etc.

do you have 20 credit cards for 100MB of free database?

PayPal lets you generate one-time use credit card numbers, don't they?

Only in the US.

You can add as many free dev databases as you want with a single account AFAIK. You aren't limited to one per app, account, or plan.

No, heroku has a postgres service where you can create as many free dev databases as you want. These have no size restriction, just a 10,000 row limit and 0MB cache, as well as some other feature limitations.

I recall hearing folks at Heroku talk about this before - basically the message was yes, there are many ways to abuse the free service but they rarely have people _actually_ doing it.

Kind of interesting, as it would be pretty trivial to use many single dynos (with shared caching, db) in one account for one application.

I love that they technically let people do this, even though it seems like a "loophole" ripe for abuse. It's a nice attitude.

(For those who don't know – Heroku gives you 750 free dyno-hours per app per month, forever. This is in contrast to AWS, which gives you 750 free instance-hours per month per account and only for the first year, AFAIK.)

It's worth noting that Heroku silently spins down free-level apps that aren't in use (restarting them on a request), so they aren't necessarily consuming all 750hrs of machine time on every free app.

Is Postgres gaining momentum such that it might displace MySQL as the go-to DB?

I doubt it. While PostgreSQL offers a number of technological advantages over MySQL, MySQL has a lower barrier to entry and easier to understand concepts than PostgreSQL as well as being a major part of the LAMP stack, which is still the most common entry point of web development. Rather than viewing one database solution as the dominant, what we are likely to see is the diversification of database technologies with the likes of NoSQL solutions coming to prominence in stacks.

> MySQL has a lower barrier to entry and easier to understand concepts than PostgreSQL

This affirmation need some explanation. In my view, once SQL is understood, both are similar. PostgreSQL might even be simpler, as it has no concept of "engines".

I think it will depend on your community. In the Django community, postgres has always been around and is gaining a ton of momentum.

PHP world, probably always a MySQL offshoot of some sort.

For new apps -- perhaps. But existing apps are riddled with MySQLisms.

Its a small point, but I feel that MySQL administration via the console is easier to get into (for example, having SHOW CREATE TABLE to dump table creation SQL is operationally simpler than having to exit out of the console, then run pg_dump <db> --schema-only <tablename> and then start the console back up). MySQL does a lot of simplifications in that vein that I think will prevent displacement for some time to come.

There are some changes happening, but certainly MySQL will dominate pre-existing installs for the foreseeable future. Switching databases is not trivial for most applications.

Here's a blog post from 451Group in May 2012 about a survey they did: http://blogs.the451group.com/information_management/2012/05/...

And a specific bit of the presentation linked from there that I found interesting: http://www.slideshare.net/mattaslett/mysql-vs-nosql-and-news...

Slide 20.

It's certainly not conclusive, but it is interesting.

According to the Postgres documentation, CHKPass is implemented on top of the crypt() unix function.

More details would be welcome... What hashing function are you using at Heroku? Short of bcrypt, all it gives is a false sense of security.

As is, it sounds more dangerous than useful.

There are plenty of reasonable options besides bcrypt, including PBKDF2 and scrypt.

To that mind, the post has been amended to drop support for that one extension. Unless you have a great use case, it seems like the consensus is "do not use chkpass".

pgcrypto should have everything one needs and probably a few more things.

Any performance benchmarks of pgsql on heroku?

I've looked and haven't found any. But it should be relatively easy and cheap to run your own specific throughput tests, since databases are metered by the second just like dynos. I just confirmed with Heroku support that you could (for example) spin up the $6,400 database plan, run the tests for (say) half an hour, then destroy it. You'd only be charged about $5 in that case.

ltree looks awesome. I didn't know it was in there.

My favorite is fuzzystrmatch. It gives you the soundex function which lets you match things that kinda-sorta-sound-the-same. Example: https://postgres.heroku.com/dataclips/inpkhuzaczuwoppmudbles...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com