Today Heroku is rolling out one of the most significant upgrades ever to our Postgres Database-as-a-Service. This new release is focused on a set of services that run on top of your Heroku Postgres database, making it easier to understand and operate, especially at scale. In addition, we are rolling out new production database plans with double the memory and 2-3 times the performance of our existing plans at the same cost to you.

These features represent a new experience for our Postgres service, which we collectively call DbX, for database experience. The highlight of these new features is Performance Analytics, a set of analytics and visualization tools that allow you to understand...

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 --fast 

Fast forks behave differently from regular forks. They take less time to create, but the data will be somewhat out-of-date (as much as 30 hours). If your data has not changed significantly and you have not performed any schema...

Visibility into your application is necessary to properly analyze and troubleshoot issues as they arise. One of the key factors to good visibility is using logs as event streams and treating them as the canonical source of what happened on an app.

The challenge with using logs is to correlate events across the stack consisting of your application's code and Heroku's platform components. Today, we are releasing new functionality that makes this simple. By using the emerging X-Request-ID convention, you can easily correlate multiple log entries to individual HTTP(s) requests.

HTTP Request IDs are now enabled on all Heroku apps.

Understanding X-Request-ID on Heroku

Each HTTP...

Having a web or mobile app become hugely popular is one of those "good problems" to have. But success is still its own challenge - making any architecture work at high volume can often create a unique kind of complexity. And as the Internet grows, and apps become more prevalent, its an increasingly common requirement.

The largest app on Heroku routinely exceeds 10,000 requests / second, and two of the top 50 sites on the Internet (as measured by Quantcast) - Urban Dictionary (45th largest) and Upworthy (40th largest) - run on Heroku. Across all apps, Heroku is now serving over 5 billion requests per day (or about 60,000 requests per second).

Heroku has always been guided by the...

Editor's Note: We are cross-posting this article from the Salesforce Blog. It shows how we are bringing Heroku to a new market and audience - Salesforce customers - using a new product and message. If you are a user of both Heroku and Salesforce and are interested in connecting them, check out Heroku1.

Apps are an essential part of the Internet of Customers. They are the dashboards to people’s lives. They allow your customers to be part of your business’ workflows, and for you to engage with them on an unprecedented level. Customer connected apps are the next phase of how companies are innovating and gaining competitive advantage.

Today, we are launching Heroku1, a complete service...

At our core, Heroku's goal is to make it easier for developers to build great apps. We do this by creating tools which allow developers to focus on writing code, rather than wasting time on managing infrastructure. To coincide with this week's Dreamforce event, we are launching several tools targeted at developers who write apps on Heroku that integrate with Salesforce.com.

If you aren't part of the Salesforce world, don't worry. We remain 100% committed to our core audience of web and mobile developers and will continue to release great new features and functionality like websockets and high-availability databases.

Force.com, a full stack platform for building...

Thousands of Heroku customers have already updated their apps to utilize 2X dynos since they entered public beta on April 5. By providing twice the memory and CPU share, 2X dynos help to improve app performance and efficiency.

2X Dynos enter General Availability today. Starting tomorrow, June 1, 2013, 2X dynos will be billed at the full $0.10 per hour rate.

Heroku customers have used 2X dynos to solve a number of problems:

1. Concurrency for Rails with Unicorn - Rails apps see significant performance improvements using Unicorn. In-dyno queuing allows requests to be served by any available worker. 2X dynos allow more workers per dyno, yielding better-than-linear performance...

This Wednesday 10/17 from 3-5pm we will be holding office hours for customers and users in our San Francisco office.

This is an opportunity for you to come meet us and ask questions about developing your apps on Heroku. It is an opportunity for us to learn more about you and your needs.

Heroku engineers, product managers, and designers will be available to chat with you about your code, application, business, or whatever else you want. Maybe you're a new user, and have some getting started questions. Perhaps you've been using Heroku for ages and have a high level architectural question. Or maybe you just want to shake someone's hand from the Heroku Postgres team. Either way...

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 (dblink), a...

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 interfaceor the command line:

heroku addons:remove HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_COLOR --app app_name 

If you have been waiting to use these plans because they have been in beta, then your wait is (almost) over. They...

Today, the Heroku Postgres team released into beta the new basic plan, $9 / month version of the free dev plan.

Accompanying this announcement is the implementation of a 10,000 row limit on the dev plan. This row limit was designed to correspond to the 5mb limit on the existing free shared plan.

Please note that these plans are still beta, and Heroku Postgres has not yet announced a migration schedule from the shared plan. However you can start using these plans today.

Read more about the new plan, and the mechanics of the row limits on the Heroku Postgres Blog.

Six weeks ago we launched into beta the Heroku Postgres dev plan, a free, postgres 9.1 plan that offers many of the features of our production tier service. Over 3,000 of these dev databases are in active use, and it has been operating exceptionally well.

When we launched the dev plan, we wrote that the plan would be limited based on rows rather than physical byte size. Today we are implementing a 10,000 row limit for the dev plan. This limit was chosen to correspond to the 5mb limit on the existing, shared database service. Over 98% of the active shared databases that are under 5mb are also under the 10,000 row limit.

Introducing the Basic Plan

If you need more than 10,000 rows, you...

Last week we launched our dev plan, a free database designed for development and testing. Today, we are launching into public beta two new plans: Crane and Kappa. These plans are part of our production tier, offering the same monitoring, operations, support, and data protection features as our more expensive plans.

Crane is available for $50 per month and features a 400 mb cache. Kappa is $100 per month and features a 800 mb cache. They can be provisioned immediately via the Heroku Postgres website or via our command line tool:

$ heroku addons:add heroku-postgresql:crane 

Use Cases

Crane and Kappa make Heroku Postgres' fully managed database service available to a much wider...

Introducing the newest plan in the Heroku Postgres line-up: dev. It is an updated replacement for the PostgreSQL 8.3-based shared database add-on. This plan is available immediately in public beta:

$ heroku addons:add heroku-postgresql:dev 

It can also be provisioned through the Heroku add-ons catalog.

What's New?

This new dev plan offers increased parity between our free database service and our paid, production plans. New features include:

• Postgres 9.1
• Data clips
• hstore
• Direct database access from psql or other libpq clients.
• Support for most pg commands in the Heroku command line client.
• Visibility through the web interface at postgres.heroku.com.
• Support for many databases...

One of the great strengths of PostgreSQL is extensibility. Just as the JVM has become more than a way to just run Java—spawning languages such as Clojure and Scala—PostgreSQL has become more than just a home to relational data and the SQL language. Our first officially supported Postgres extension, hstore, enables you to build better apps faster without sacrificing the power, reliability, and flexibility of the underlying PostgreSQL storage engine.

By using hstore, you will be able to leverage the flexibility and agility of schema-less data stores in existing environments. Although hstore is a mature, stable solution, it has recently been gathering widespread excitement:

• The Durable...

Data clips are available today in beta as a standard feature on all Heroku Postgres databases.

When we share information on the Internet, we do so by sharing URLs. We send URLs for locations, books, videos, and even source code. Until now there hasn't been a convenient way to share data inside a database. That's why we're introducing Data Clips. They are a fast and easy way to unlock the data in your database in the form of a secure URL.

Data Clips allow the results of SQL queries on a Heroku Postgres database to be easily shared. Simply create a query on postgres.heroku.com, and then share the resulting URL with co-workers, colleagues, or the world. Data clips can be shared...

One of the benefits of consuming a database through Heroku Postgres is that we are continually improving the service. This benefit is compounded by the fact that our service is based on PostgreSQL, a vibrant and active open source project. The release of PostgreSQL 9.1 had added a number of feature, performance and reliability improvements. These are available today with our beta support for PostgreSQL 9.1.

We have been testing and watching PostgreSQL 9.1 since it became available in September. With the recent release of 9.1.2, it is now ready for prime time on Heroku. Test out PG 9.1 right now with:

$ heroku addons:add heroku-postgresql version=9.1 

PostgreSQL 9.1 can also be selected...

Until now, Heroku's Postgres database service - originally launched in 2007 - has only been available to Heroku customers for use with Heroku platform apps. Today we're excited to announce the launch of Heroku Postgres as a standalone service.

With measured service uptime of four nines (99.99%), and designed data durability of eleven nines (99.999999999%), the service is trustworthy for mission-critical data. As of today, these production-quality Heroku Postgres databases are independently available for use from any cloud platform, provisioned instantly, metered by the second, and without contract.

Battle Tested

Heroku Postgres has successfully and safely written 19 billion...

At Heroku, we believe PostgreSQL offers the best mix of
powerful features, data integrity, speed, standards compliance, and
open-source code of any SQL database on the planet. That’s why we
were so excited to see the new release of PostgreSQL, version 9.0.1.

The release is described as “the most anticipated PostgreSQL version in five years” for good reason. The release adds over 200 new features and improvements. For more on PostgreSQL 9, see the coverage in Computerworld, Infoworld, and Linux.com as well as the discussion on Hacker News.

Today we are making PostgreSQL 9 available to all Heroku users through our public beta program. It is offered as a dedicated database...

Recently we announced the release of PG Backups, our new database backup service. Since then, PG Backups has seen rapid adoption and has been successfully managing the backups of a large and growing number of our production customers.

Today we are announcing the deprecation of Bundles. Although Bundles has served the Heroku community well, we have found that it doesn’t scale to adequately meet the needs of the larger, more complex applications running on Heroku today.

We encourage all of our users to migrate their application backup strategy to PG Backups as soon as possible.

Starting today (November 30, 2010) we will no longer allow the Bundles add-on to be added to applications....

Heroku is launching a new database backup solution. Heroku PG Backups is available immediately and is the officially supported and recommended method of backing up your PostgreSQL database on Heroku.

PG Backups is a significant architectural improvement over Bundles and is designed to handle the large-scale, production databases that are being deployed to Heroku today. In addition to these backend improvements, PG Backups offers several new features:

• Backups are captured using pg_dump’s -Fc compressed format. This is the most reliable, fastest way of capturing backups from PostgreSQL.
• Data can be easily imported to your application – the pgbackups:restore command can restore...

Today Heroku is releasing an update to our dedicated database service. Heroku PostgreSQL provides an improved upgrade path for our users as their applications grow by offering new features, new plans, and instant provisioning.

Product Improvements

• Direct database connectivity through psql (the Postgres command-line tool) or libpq (the Postgres client library). Direct connectivity makes it easier to introspect the database directly and run ad-hoc queries. It also enables complex, multi-application architectures with shared data stores.
• Instant provisioning and customer driven migrations. Previously, upgrading to our dedicated databases was a semi-manual procedure which required...