Building a SaaS product, a system to handle sensor data from an internet-connected thermostat or car, or an e-commerce store often requires handling a large stream of product usage data, or events. Managing event streams lets you view, in near real-time, how users are interacting with your SaaS app or the products on your e-commerce store; this is interesting because it lets you spot anomalies and get immediate data-driven feedback on new features. While this type of stream visualization is useful to a point, pushing events into a data warehouse lets you ask deeper questions using SQL.

In this post, we’ll show you how to build a system using Apache Kafka on Heroku to manage and visualize...

Today, we're happy to announce full support for PostgreSQL 10, opening our managed Postgres solution to the full slate of features released after a successful two-month Beta period. PostgreSQL 10 is now the default version for all new provisioned Heroku Postgres databases. All Postgres extensions, tooling, and integration with the Heroku developer experience are ready to use, giving you the power of PostgreSQL 10 with the ease and usability of Heroku for building data-centric applications.

We'd like to re-emphasize a few features - among the many released in Postgres 10 - that we are particularly excited about.

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.

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...