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Heroku Postgres

Heroku has long been committed to making PostgreSQL one of the best relational databases in the world. We’re also committed to giving you the ability to try the latest release as soon as it’s available. Today, we’re pleased to announce the public beta of Postgres 9.5 on Heroku.

PostgreSQL 9.5 brings a bevy of super exciting new features with the most prominent being the new UPSERT functionality. UPSERT gives you the expected behavior of an …

We’re pleased to announce PostgreSQL 9.4 in general availability for Heroku Postgres. After announcing the beta earlier this year, we’ve had many developers provision databases against this new version. Throughout the beta period, developers raved about the new data type along with the performance enhancements to materialized views. This uptake by early adopters demonstrates an interest in everything that the new version of PostgreSQL provides, from features to performance.

New Features and Performance Updates

One …

Performing a backup is one of those tasks that ensures your application can recover from database or hardware failures should they ever occur. Over four year ago, we recognized this as a best practice and came out with PGBackups, an add-on that reduces the risk and complexity of taking database backups. Today, we’re pleased to announce two big improvements: enhanced reliability, and the ability to schedule backups.

Better By Default

One of the main drivers …

Each major release of PostgreSQL brings lots of great new functionality. The recent release of PostgreSQL 9.4 includes an exciting new JSON data type, improvements to window functions, materialized views, and a host of other performance improvements and enhancements. We’ll go into more depth on what’s new and exciting in this release below, but first, we want you to know that Postgres 9.4 is available in beta right now on Heroku:

$ heroku addons:add heroku-postgresql…

Heroku Connect is a service offered by Heroku which performs 2-way data synchronization between Salesforce and a Heroku Postgres database.

When we first built Heroku Connect, we decided to use polling to determine when data had changed on either side. Polling isn’t pretty, but its simple and reliable, and those are “top line” features for Heroku Connect. But polling incurs two significant costs: high latency and wasted resources. The more you poll the more you waste API calls and database queries checking when there are no data changes. But if you lengthen your polling interval then you grow the latency for the data synchronization.

Did you know that Heroku databases can be forked? Forking a database creates a byte-for-byte copy that can be used for testing and development. It is a useful tool that allows teams to be agile with their data.

Today, forking databases is becoming faster. Fast forking reduces the time to create a fork by hours for high transaction database. To quickly fork a database, simply add the --fast flag:

$ heroku addons:add heroku-postgresql:crane --fork BLUE…

On November 18th, a replication bug was found in Postgres that affected the most recent versions of every Postgres release. The corruption that this bug may introduce could go undetected, and it manifests itself as a follower potentially having an inconsistent view of the data. For example, data could be present in the primary and not on the follower, or data deleted or updated on the primary and not from the follower. The likelihood of …

Many of our customers have recently asked about our connection limit settings on our new Heroku Postgres tiers. Previously we allowed for 500 connections across all production databases, however now there is some variance in the number of connections allowed with only the larger plans offering 500. In individual conversations with customers we’ve detailed the reasoning behind this, and feel its worth sharing this more broadly here now.

For some initial background, our connection limit …

At Heroku we have long considered PostgreSQL to be a powerful and reliable open-source database for keeping data safe and accessible for serious applications with demanding workflows and use cases.

Over the years we’ve invested heavily in continuing to improve it, whether it’s by employing Postgres major contibutors, employing driver maintainers, funding core development, or being part of language communites such as Ruby and Python to help spread the good news that …

Today we’re excited to announce an evolution of what it means to be a database as a service provider. Along with new features such as the ability to roll back your database to an arbitrary point in time and high availability, we now provide an entirely new level of operational expertise that’s built right in. This new level of service allows you to feel at ease while taking advantage of your database in ways you …

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