Update: On closer inspection, the lock type was not on the table, but on a tuple. For more information on this locking mechanism see the internal Postgresql tuple locking documentation. Postgres does not have lock promotion as suggested in the debugging section of this post.

I maintain an internal-facing service at Heroku that does metadata processing. It's not real-time, so there's plenty of slack for when things go wrong. Recently I discovered that the system was getting bogged down to the point where no jobs were being executed at all. After hours of debugging, I found the problem was an UPDATE on a single row on a single table was causing the entire table to lock, which...

Today, we’re thrilled to announce four new trusted data integrations that allow data to flow seamlessly and securely between Heroku and external resources in public clouds and private data centers:

• Heroku Postgres via mutual TLS
• Heroku Postgres via PrivateLink
• Apache Kafka on Heroku via PrivateLink
• Heroku Redis via PrivateLink

These integrations expand Heroku's security and trust boundary to cover the connections to external resources and the data that passes through them. They enable true multi-cloud app and data architectures and keep developers focused on delivering value versus managing infrastructure. Data is the driving force in modern app development, and these...

There are many reasons to choose Heroku Data services, but keeping the services you use secure and up-to-date rank near the top. This foundation of trust is the most important commitment we make to our customers, and frequent and timely maintenances are one way we deliver on this promise.

We do everything we can to minimize downtime, which is typically between 10 – 60 seconds per maintenance. There are ways for you to minimize disruption too (see the tips and tricks below). The rest of the post explains how we think about Heroku Data maintenances, how we perform them, and when we perform them.

An Ounce of Prevention...

Hackers exploit known but unpatched vulnerabilities or out-of-date...

The data we store holds value, but refining data into meaning remains a difficult task. Over the last few months, we've taken a step back to figure out what we can do to help our users cross that divide, and rebuilt Heroku Dataclips from scratch with that goal in mind. The result is an experience that makes accessing and working with your data easier than ever, enabling anyone on your team familiar with SQL to take advantage of your most valuable asset without the need for specialized tools or knowledge of the database.

Dataclips is a flexible, lightweight way to query your data in Heroku Postgres and share the results. At Heroku, we use them regularly across all of our departments....

Setting up a database is a relatively straightforward process (Heroku has an add-on for that), but getting it to run well in production is sometimes another matter. As your application grows and your data grows along with it, you will likely find a number of performance bottlenecks specifically related to your database, and this post aims to help you diagnose and address those issues when they arise.

As with all components of your infrastructure it’s important to have early visibility into the performance characteristics of your database. Watching this data as your application grows will give you a much better chance of spotting performance issues and regressions as they’re introduced.

I...