Earlier this month, PostgreSQL 10.0 was released. Today, we are excited to announce PostgreSQL 10 is available in beta on Heroku, bringing a number of notable feature and performance improvements to our managed PostgreSQL database service.

The beta provides customers who want to try out the new release an easy way to do so, while customers who are happy with the current version can continue to stay on version 9.6 until we make version 10 generally available. Also, new databases will continue to default to version 9.6 until we release version 10 to GA.

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.

I recently demonstrated how you can use Rack Mini Profiler to find and fix slow queries. It’s a valuable tool for well-trafficked pages, but sometimes the slowdown is happening on a page you don't visit often, or in a worker task that isn't visible via Rack Mini Profiler. How can you find and fix those slow queries?

Heroku has a feature called expensive queries that can help you out. It shows historical performance data about the queries running on your database: most time consuming, most frequently invoked, slowest execution time, and slowest I/O.

Recently, I used this feature to identify and address some slow queries for a site I run on Heroku named CodeTriage (the best way to...

Postgres is our favorite database—it’s reliable, powerful and secure. Here are a few essential tips learned from building, and helping our customers build, apps around Postgres. These tips will help ensure you get the most out of Postgres, whether you’re running it on your own box or using the Heroku Postgres add-on.

Use a Connection Pooler

Postgres connections are not free, as each established connection has a cost. By using a connection pooler, you’ll reduce the number of connections you use and reduce your overhead.

Most Postgres client libraries include a built-in connection pooler; make sure you’re using it.

You might also consider using our pgbouncer buildpack if your application...

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...