

Heroku's new, free PostgreSQL 9.1 development database - chanks
https://postgres.heroku.com/blog/past/2012/4/26/heroku_postgres_development_plan/

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chanks
It looks like Heroku's dropping the larger shared database offering ($15/month
for 20 GB). That's... disconcerting. That means their cheapest production
database now is the Ronin for $200 a month, but I have an app going into
production soon that won't need anywhere near that much power.

~~~
mattsoldo
The shared 20gb plan (based on the older, Postgres 8.3-based architecture) is
still available, as is the free 5mb shared offering. We won't replace these
until this new development plan is out of beta. Once we do we will continue to
have a database plan at or near this price point. Stay tuned.

Matt Soldo (Product Manager, Heroku Postgres)

~~~
Stwerner
Looking forward to hearing the features the "database plan at or near this
price point" will have. We would love to be able to connect to our database
with other apps besides the main one - even if it ended up somewhere between
the $200/month plan and the $15/month - it would be incredibly useful.

~~~
mkramer05
This is awesome. Had been really bummed about the lack of direct psql access
for the shared database. Thanks Matt and co.!

~~~
Stwerner
Just a clarification - I was kind of requesting a feature, hoping that the new
plans will work that way.

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mattsoldo
Thanks for the feature request. Attaching multiple apps to one DB is something
we've wanted to do for quite a while...

FYI, you can hack this by provisioning a database on one app, then manually
setting the DATABASE_URL config var on a second app to match that of the first
app.

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jarcoal
I realize that the shared databases weren't really designed for production,
but I used them for many projects in production, and they worked great. They
included free backups, so I just took snapshots often and figured if they
zapped one, I could just reload the data. The lack of backup on these new free
ones kind of sucks.

I appreciate what they are doing, but this is a step back for how I utilize
Heroku.

~~~
mattsoldo
Keep in mind that the dev databases have Continuous Protection
(<https://postgres.heroku.com/#protect>), and manual backup plans work on them
as well.

~~~
jarcoal
Good to know! Thanks

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killion
This is great because if you watch Heroku outages the shared database is down
more than anything else. Now my staging environment will be up as often as
production.

~~~
fdr
To clear up a potential misconception, the availability characteristics of the
new dev plan will probably be about the same as before. It is just that
historically Heroku has had a hair-trigger about reporting _any_ shared
database being offline, a practice that continues now.

Besides considerably better production/dev parity in the higher-level paid
plans versus the aging shared Postgres 8.3, the biggest feature I'm excited
about is being able to connect directly to the shared database such as via
"psql". One can also run pg_dump/pg_restore directly to their local
environment, which for development purposes with small amounts of data can
result in drastically faster backup/restore cycles between one's computer and
Heroku than what PGBackups can provide.

Disclaimer: I work for Heroku, on data stuff.

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jguimont
How do you migrate your apps?

~~~
willlll
PGBackups <https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/pgbackups>

