Six weeks ago we launched into beta the Heroku Postgres dev plan, a 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 can...

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 addon page 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...

Today has been a very good day for Postgres.

We here at Heroku love Postgres, and we aren't afraid to show it. Here's how three different Herokai showed their PG love in three awesome ways in the last 24 hours:

Postgres.app is the easiest way to run PostgreSQL on the Mac. Just open the app, and you have a server up and running with Postgres 9.1 and PostGIS 2.0. PostgreSQL has not been the easiest things to install--especially for new developers--so we see Postgres.app as an important step in making the world's best database more accessible to everyone. Postgres.app was created by Mattt Thompson, and launched in beta today. It will soon be available as a free download in the...

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...