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
pgcommands in the Heroku command line client. - Visibility through the web interface at postgres.heroku.com.
- Support for many databases connected to one application.
How does it differ from production plans?
The dev plan is designed to offer the database features required for development and testing, without the production-grade operations, monitoring, and support found in our paid plans. Fork, follow, and automatic database backups are not available on the dev plan (manual backups are available on the dev plan).
In addition, the dev plan will have a limit on the number of rows that can be stored in the database. This represents a departure from the sized-based limit on our current shared plan, and is due to the fact that data storage layer mechanisms can cause confusing discrepancies relative to what a user would expect, particularly for small data sets. The limit will be set such that databases under the current size limit should be under the record limit as well.
Beta Period
The dev plan is available for testing in public beta. Although it is not designed for mission-critical data in any case (it is a development plan after all), the risk of data loss or unavailability is increased as a beta product. The dev plan will continue to be free once it has been released from beta.
What does it replace?
Once out of beta, the dev plan will replace the Postgres 8.3-based shared-database plans as the default & free relational database service on Heroku. The $15/month, Postgres 8.3-based 20gb plan continues to be available during this beta. It will also be replaced with a Postgres 9.1-based plan at a comparable price point.
It also replaces the private-beta Postgres 9.1-based heroku-shared-postgresql add-on, which is immediately deprecated.
Try it and send feedback
Try the development plan today:
$ heroku addons:add heroku-postgresql:dev
And send feedback to dod-feedback@heroku.com.