postgres

Smartphones have changed the world – everyone has a device in their pocket that’s constantly connected to the internet and knows where you are. Combined with the rise of digital mapping it has become commonplace to build applications that use GIS (Geographical Information Systems) to digitally represent our physical reality and our location in it. Storing and manipulating geospatial data has become an essential part of application development. If you are building a mobile app it’s becoming table stakes that you take advantage of location. Today we’re releasing PostGIS 2.0 into public beta as an extension to Heroku Postgres. Now…

Over a year ago we began working with the community as to how we could help to make Postgres better. Much of this came to fruition with PostgreSQL version 9.2 and three months ago we released support of Postgres 9.2 into GA. We've now seen many users begin taking advantage of the powerful features in this version including: Better visibility with pg_stat_statements URL support JSON datatype and more In these three months the 9.2 PostgreSQL version has had time to bake including several minor updates fixing a variety of bugs. Today as a result of all of this we're making…

Heroku Postgres Databases have been patched Data is one of the most valuable assets of any company. As a database-as-a-service provider, one of our biggest responsibilities is ensuring your data is kept safe. A few weeks ago, one of the worst security vulnerabilities to date in PostgreSQL was discovered. To address this issue, Heroku deployed a point release upgrade across the entire Heroku Postgres service earlier this week. This resulted in a period of database unavailability, typically with a duration of less than one minute. Every database running on Heroku Postgres is now appropriately patched and is unaffected by the…

An organization's data is its most valuable asset. Unfortunately, that data is usually trapped inside a database with few ways to access it by a privileged handful of people. Too often reports are manually generated and their results pasted into emails; dashboards get built but rapidly become outdated and never answer the right questions. We have so many great tools for collaborating around our source code, why is data still in the dark ages? At Heroku Postgres, we believe that your data should flow like water. Only the most up-to-date data should be available any time you have a decision…

Hosting your data on one of the largest fleets of databases in the world comes with certain advantages. One of those benefits is that we can aggregate the collective pain points that face our users and work within the Postgres community to help find solutions to them. In the previous year we worked very closely with the broader Postgres community to build features, fix bugs, and resolve pain points. You've already seen some of the results of that work in the form of extension support on Heroku and query cancellation. With the 9.2 release we're delighted to say that with…

Git and Github revolutionized software development by letting you fork your source repository with a single click. Wouldn't it be great to be able to do the same thing with your database? In the same way you can fork your code you can now fork your data. Fork changes the way you can work with your data, making it a snap to provision a clone of your production database. The technology is simple, safe, and robust, and thanks to Heroku Postgres' cloud architecture, places no load on your primary database. Today, we’re announcing the release of this functionality into General…

Today we’re releasing the ability to follow your Heroku Postgres Database into General Availability: this lets you easily create multiple read-only asynchronous replicas of your database, known as followers. After an extended beta period during which over 3,000 followers were created, many of which help power core Heroku systems, we’re excited to make the ability to safely and easily scale out access to your data available to all Heroku Postgres users. Followers enable some great use cases: Easy read traffic scaling Fast upgrades Higher availability One use case that has historically been challenging in database management is setting up a…

Databases are the well known solution for storing data for your application. However they sometimes lack functionality required by application developers such as data encryption or cross database reporting. As a result developers are forced to write the needed functionality at their application layer. Postgres 9.1, which already has an extensive collection of data types and functions, took the first step towards mitigating this by creating an extension system which allows the database’s functionality to be expanded. Today we are releasing support for 16 new Postgres extensions which add exciting new functionality including the ability to query from multiple database…

In past months we've released the public beta of our dev, basic, crane and kappa plans. We've received positive feedback from everyone using the new database plans. Based on this strong positive response and adoption during the beta, we're officially moving these plans to general availability starting today. In conjunction with the GA of our starter tier, we're deprecating our shared database plans. The new dev and basic plans offer many improvements including Postgres 9.1 with schemaless SQL, data clips, direct psql access, and a web management interface. Beginning August 8, 2012, we will begin migrating shared database users over…

We are happy to announce that our new line-up of database plans are being released on August 1st. The dev, basic, crane, and kappa plans make many of the most exciting features of our fully-managed database service available to a wider audience. They are now ready for all users. We will also begin billing for these plans as of August 1st. If you have been beta testing one of these databases and do not wish to incur charges for it going forward, please remove it immediately via the web interface or the command line: heroku addons:remove HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_COLOR –app app_name If…