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.
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 improvements that should allow a number of different workloads to execute faster than they had in prior releases of PostgreSQL. With 9.6, the PostgreSQL community, along with Heroku’s...
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 events in an application or is analogous to an application log. Having a table of this size isn’t a problem in and of itself, but can lead to other issues; query performance can start to degrade and indexes can take much longer to update. Maintenance tasks, such as vacuum, can also become...
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 and the customer feedback is a testament to that hard work. If you want to try out the new version, getting it is as simple as provisioning a new database:
$ heroku addons:create heroku-postgresql -a sushi More UPSERT
UPSERT,...
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 insert, or, if there is a conflict, an update, and is performant without the risk of race conditions for your data. UPSERT was one of the last few detracting arguments against PostgreSQL. A special thanks goes to Peter Geoghegan on the Heroku Postgres...
Today we’re pleased to announce general availability of Heroku Key-Value Store with a number of new features and a more robust developer experience. By giving developers a different data management primitive, we’re helping them meet the needs of building modern, scalable applications. The classic example of using multiple data stores in an application is the e-commerce site that stores its valuable financial information in a relational database while the user session tokens are saved in a key-value store like Redis. This is one of the use cases where Redis has proven to be instrumental in solving problems like caching, queuing and session storage, just to name a few.
In addition to...
Developers increasingly need a variety of datastores for their projects -- no one database can serve all the needs of a modern, scalable application. For example, an e-commerce app might store its valuable transaction data in a relational database while user session information is stored in a key-value store because it changes often and needs to be accessed quickly. This is a common pattern across many app types, and the need for a key-value store is especially acute. Today, we are pleased to announce the beta of Heroku Key-Value Store, joining Heroku Postgres as our second data service.
We have deep experience with Redis; internally at Heroku, we use Redis extensively as a queue, as a...
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 of the most notable new features of 9.4 is the JSONB data type. While the text-based JSON data type has existed in PostgreSQL for some time, JSONB is a binary storage format...
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 for the upgrade was the occasional backup stall experienced by users. In some cases, PGBackups would encounter a bug that resulted in degraded performance of the database while a backup was being taken. This had adverse effects for...
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