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 assistance from our support team and took several hours to schedule and complete. The process now takes only a few minutes and is completely user controlled.
- PostgreSQL 8.4.4 support (Postgres 9 is coming soon…).
- Stored procedures through the PL/pgSQL language.
- Improved backup, restore, import and export through our new pgbackups add-on.
New Plans
In addition to these great new features, we’ve introduced several new plans:
- Ika: $800/month, 50 connections, 7.5 GB of RAM, 4 compute units
- Baku: $3200/month, 128 connections, 34 GB of RAM, 13 compute units
- Mecha: $6400/month, 256 connections, 68 GB of RAM, 26 compute units
We now provide a suggested number of connections for each database plan. These are the maximum number of dynos, workers, and other processes that we recommend connecting to your database simultaneously. The connection numbers are meant to serve as a guideline for architecting a performant application on the Heroku platform.
Legacy Dedicated Database Support
Customers of Heroku’s legacy dedicated database (anyone who provisioned a dedicated database before today) can take advantage of these new features by provisioning a new database and migrating their application data to it.