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Heroku Postgres

Earlier this month, PostgreSQL 10.0 was released. Today, we are excited to announce PostgreSQL 10 is available in beta on Heroku, bringing a number of notable feature and performance improvements to our managed PostgreSQL database service.

The beta provides customers who want to try out the new release an easy way to do so, while customers who are happy with the current version can continue to stay on version 9.6 until we make version 10 generally available. Also, new databases will continue to default to version 9.6 until we release version 10 to GA.

At the core of Heroku’s data services sits Postgres, and today, we are making it even easier to bend Heroku Postgres to the very unique needs of your application’s stack. With these new features, you can easily customize Postgres, making it more powerful and configurable, while retaining all the automation and management capabilities of Heroku Postgres you know and love. By changing Postgres settings, creating and working with database credentials, and providing tight integrations to Heroku and Heroku CI, you now have the ability to further tune your Postgres database to your team’s needs.

I recently demonstrated how you can use Rack Mini Profiler to find and fix slow queries. It’s a valuable tool for well-trafficked pages, but sometimes the slowdown is happening on a page you don't visit often, or in a worker task that isn't visible via Rack Mini Profiler. How can you find and fix those slow queries?

Heroku has a feature called expensive queries that can help you out. It shows historical performance data …

Postgres is our favorite database—it’s reliable, powerful and secure. Here are a few essential tips learned from building, and helping our customers build, apps around Postgres. These tips will help ensure you get the most out of Postgres, whether you’re running it on your own box or using the Heroku Postgres add-on.

Use a Connection Pooler

Postgres connections are not free, as each established connection has a cost. By using a connection pooler, you’ll …

PostgreSQL 9.6 is now generally available for Heroku Postgres. The main focus of this release is centered around performance. PostgreSQL 9.6 includes enhanced parallelism for key capabilities that sets the stage for significant performance improvements for a variety of analytic and transactional workloads.

With 9.6, certain actions, like individual queries, can be split up into multiple parts and performed in parallel. This means that everything from running queries, creating indexes, and sorting have major …

One of the interesting patterns that we’ve seen, as a result of managing one of the largest fleets of Postgres databases, is one or two tables growing at a rate that’s much larger and faster than the rest of the tables in the database. In terms of absolute numbers, a table that grows sufficiently large is on the order of hundreds of gigabytes to terabytes in size. Typically, the data in this table tracks …

Austen Ito is a software engineer at leading online fashion brand Bonobos, based in New York. Read our Bonobos customer story for more information about how Heroku has helped their business.

What do you have running on Heroku?

We’re running just about everything on Heroku, including our Bonobos.com website, cross-app messaging services, an API for our ERP, as well as some internal tools. The only pieces that are not on Heroku are the Data Science …

Starting today, Postgres 9.5 is now the new default version for all new Heroku Postgres databases. We’ve had hundreds of customers using early beta versions of 9.5 and the feedback has been positive. For many customers, the new UPSERT functionality was the last feature that prevented many of them from moving from other relational databases to Postgres. The engineering staff at Heroku and the Postgres community at large has spent years bringing UPSERT to fruition …

We recently sat down for a chat with Bill Curtis, a co-founder and the CTO of Sweet Tooth (Now Smile.io), a points and rewards app for online stores worldwide.

What has been your greatest challenge?

We’re serving way more data today than we ever have, so scaling is mission-critical. In the past, we’ve struggled with traffic spikes. For example, there are seasonal spikes, like Black Friday or Cyber Monday. There are also spikes from …

A big update to the beloved Python web framework known as Django was released recently: Django 1.9. This release contains a long list of improvements for everything from the graphical styling of the admin to the ability to run your test suite in parallel.

Our favorite improvements to the framework were, of course, all about our favorite database: Postgres. Here are some of the highlights from the official release notes (highly recommended reading).

Renamed

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