We recently sat down for a chat with Bill Curtis, a co-founder and the CTO of Sweet Tooth (Now Smile.io), a points and rewards app for online stores worldwide.

What has been your greatest challenge?

We’re serving way more data today than we ever have, so scaling is mission-critical. In the past, we’ve struggled with traffic spikes. For example, there are seasonal spikes, like Black Friday or Cyber Monday. There are also spikes from merchant activity, such as load testing stores or importing a large number of orders.

I recently tweeted our requests-per-hour graph. It showed that during the huge spikes for this year’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday, our product availability was seamless on...

A big update to the beloved Python web framework known as Django was released recently: Django 1.9. This release contains a long list of improvements for everything from the graphical styling of the admin to the ability to run your test suite in parallel.

Our favorite improvements to the framework were, of course, all about our favorite database: Postgres. Here are some of the highlights from the official release notes (highly recommended reading).

Renamed PostgreSQL Back-end

Django's fantastic built-in Postgres database back-end received a nice name change. Previously known as django.db.backends.postgresql_psycopg2, the back-end will now be officially available as the much easier...

Heroku has long been committed to making PostgreSQL one of the best relational databases in the world. We’re also committed to giving you the ability to try the latest release as soon as it’s available. Today, we’re pleased to announce the public beta of Postgres 9.5 on Heroku.

PostgreSQL 9.5 brings a bevy of super exciting new features with the most prominent being the new UPSERT functionality. UPSERT gives you the expected behavior of an insert, or, if there is a conflict, an update, and is performant without the risk of race conditions for your data. UPSERT was one of the last few detracting arguments against PostgreSQL. A special thanks goes to Peter Geoghegan on the Heroku Postgres...

We’re pleased to announce PostgreSQL 9.4 in general availability for Heroku Postgres. After announcing the beta earlier this year, we’ve had many developers provision databases against this new version. Throughout the beta period, developers raved about the new data type along with the performance enhancements to materialized views. This uptake by early adopters demonstrates an interest in everything that the new version of PostgreSQL provides, from features to performance.

New Features and Performance Updates

One of the most notable new features of 9.4 is the JSONB data type. While the text-based JSON data type has existed in PostgreSQL for some time, JSONB is a binary storage format...

Performing a backup is one of those tasks that ensures your application can recover from database or hardware failures should they ever occur. Over four year ago, we recognized this as a best practice and came out with PGBackups, an add-on that reduces the risk and complexity of taking database backups. Today, we’re pleased to announce two big improvements: enhanced reliability, and the ability to schedule backups.

Better By Default

One of the main drivers for the upgrade was the occasional backup stall experienced by users. In some cases, PGBackups would encounter a bug that resulted in degraded performance of the database while a backup was being taken. This had adverse effects for...