
Amazon RDS now supports PostgreSQL 9.6.1 - rachbelaid
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1717/
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wasd
I'm fairly impressed by RDS's turn around time. 9.6 dropped in late September
and they're already supporting it in just over a month. I wish Google Cloud
SQL supported Postgres at all. Sad that there's limited competition in managed
postgres space (most notable competitor being Heroku).

~~~
jakobegger
There are many options for hosted PostgreSQL.

See for example this staggering list of hosting providers in Europe:
[https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_hosting/euro...](https://www.postgresql.org/support/professional_hosting/europe/)

Yes, most of those are smaller companies. But some of these companies are
directly involved in the development of PostgreSQL (just look at the
PostgreSQL-hackers mailing list), so they should really know what they are
doing!

~~~
tokenizerrr
Do people really talk to databases over WAN (which means relatively high
latency)? I was under the impression this was a bad idea.

~~~
oskari
Many of the hosting providers provide PG as a service in multiple clouds /
hosting providers allowing you to run your applications on your own VMs in the
same cloud. So while you would be using the external IP addresses to
communicate with the database it'd still be in the same datacenter.

Also, as pointed out in the parent post, some of the hosting providers such as
us (Aiven, [https://aiven.io](https://aiven.io)) are directly involved in
PostgreSQL development and one of the bugfixes in the latest releases (9.6.1
and 9.5.5) that just came out was contributed by us.

~~~
tokenizerrr
Running within the same cloud provider makes sense, I hadn't thought of that.

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kstrauser
And is it HIPAA certified yet? Because the lack of that is what made me spend
a week porting a project to use RDS/MySQL just a little while ago. We've been
told it's coming Real Soon Now since last year.

I wanted to use PostgreSQL for a whole host of reasons, but not so much that
we wanted to certify our own instances.

~~~
boyd
Another option is to use Aptible:
[https://www.aptible.com/](https://www.aptible.com/)

It's basically (a better) Heroku with an emphasis on enabling HIPAA/HITECH
compliance. They do both app and DB hosting (including Postgres). And it's on
AWS so integrates easily with existing infrastructure/code.

Disclaimer: Biased as I know the founders and we use the product. But they are
good people and it's a good product!

~~~
fuhrysteve
But aptible doesn't have managed postgres. I still have to do all the work of
setting up a database and managing backups, upgrades, etc. The only thing
aptible brings to the table is single tenant hardware and encryption by
default. I can just get that from Amazon. Am I missing something about
aptible? I don't understand the attraction although it does look fancy

~~~
ZitchDog
Aptible absolutely has managed postgres, and it's great. I'm using it at this
very second.

~~~
fuhrysteve
Where can I find out more? All I see on their marketing site is "database
containers" which I interpreted as little more than a container that happens
to run a database, not as something that manages backups, point-in-time
restoration, multi-az failover, upgrades, and all the other things that RDS
has built in that many folks would otherwise prefer to have an (expensive)
postgres specialist setup and manage for you.

~~~
chasb
Dang, sorry about that:
[https://www.aptible.com/enclave/](https://www.aptible.com/enclave/)

That page needs some love, thank you for the solid comment. I think the
features we list cover your comments, but let me know if you have specific
questions or other features you'd like to see!

Source: am Aptible CEO

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snissn
Does anyone else have abysmal IO performance on postgres RDS? I have a 200 gb
provisioned ssd with 2000 iops and get abysmal bulk read performance - the
panel will report 30 mb/s and query speed is really slow with disk being the
bottleneck

~~~
estefan
IIRC there are various tricks you used to have to perform to get it to strip
across different disks in the backend. Something along the lines of allocating
20% of your storage and then increasing it 5 times until you had what you
wanted. If you provisioned a server immediately to full capacity you'd end up
with your data too close together which degraded performance.

That's something I heard that used to be true but not sure whether it's still
required with upgrades to S3 over the years...

~~~
dhd415
Interesting, I've never heard of striping tricks like that. Do you have any
links on that? And I suppose that could be applicable to EBS since it rather
than S3 is the backing store for RDS.

~~~
estefan
Sorry I don't have links. But yes, I think it was primarily to improve the
performance of EBS, not S3 (been a while since I had to work on that sort of
thing).

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psycr
Now they just need to support the Foreign Data Wrapper extension with egress
connections. Really wish that was built in because FDW itself is amazing, and
AWS RDS is easy to manage.

~~~
kyleblarson
Agree 100%. Would be awesome if you could have RDS with FDW connected to a
Redshift instance. (don't know if that's possible given the version of
Postgres upon which Redshift is based)

~~~
yuanchuan
It is definitely doable. You can refer to this blog post by AWS
([https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/join-amazon-
redshift-a...](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/join-amazon-redshift-and-
amazon-rds-postgresql-with-dblink/)) to set up FDW to Redshift.

What is more exciting is you can leverage Redshift MPP architecture with this
method.

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tbrock
This happened a couple days ago, noticed when spinning up a new RDS instance.

I'm super excited about it. It's great to have more modern managed services on
AWS especially since this brings Postgres out of the Stone Age. Lots of good
JSON support added in 9.5 and 9.6.

Previously only 9.4 was available.

~~~
Rezo
9.5 was actually added to RDS back in April [0]. There was some serious bugs
found that made them wait for 9.5.2 before adding it [1]. As a customer of
RDS, I'm really happy that they're taking their time to thoroughly test the
releases.

[0] [https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2016/04/rds-
postg...](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2016/04/rds-
postgresql-9-5-support/) [1]
[https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=240278](https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=240278)

~~~
tbrock
Yeah they only added 9.5 a couple weeks ago, very recently.

~~~
scrollaway
That's simply not true. We've been running with Postgresql 9.5 since May.

Apparently it was added in April: [https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-
new/2016/04/rds-postg...](https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-
new/2016/04/rds-postgresql-9-5-support/)

~~~
philliphaydon
I think he meant 9.6 which would make more sense.

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asah
I upgraded - took <10mins and also upgraded instance types. One slow query
(that parallelizes) is 3x faster with no SQL changes or new indices.

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enahs-sf
On a slightly tangential topic, what is Amazon doing with aurora?

~~~
sudhirj
Aurora supports MySQL so far, heard lots of good things about it. Hopefully
they'll put Postgres on it soon.

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thejosh
What's the performance of Amazon RDS like with Postgres? (Curious, never
having used it).

~~~
pritambarhate
For small to medium volume apps it's quite good. The security configuration
out of the box is quite good. All standard options like changing pgsql port,
opening it up to only your main dB instance is supported.

If needs once a week downtime for half an hour for patches. But if you use
multi AZ deployment with 2 instances it does this without any actual downtime.
Automatically manages the failover for you.

Provisioned IOPS are very expensive. For small loads use bigger general
purposes SSD say 100 to 200gb and it works OK. The IOPS are burstable so it
works out OK.

~~~
ngrilly
> If needs once a week downtime for half an hour for patches.

Half an hour downtime once a week? This sounds bad.

~~~
pritambarhate
I checked the FAQ once again:
[https://aws.amazon.com/rds/faqs/](https://aws.amazon.com/rds/faqs/)

Here are the exact words from Amazon:

> The Amazon RDS maintenance window is your opportunity to control when DB
> Instance modifications (such as scaling DB Instance class) and software
> patching occur, in the event they are requested or required. If a
> maintenance event is scheduled for a given week, it will be initiated and
> completed at some point during the maintenance window you identify.
> Maintenance windows are 30 minutes in duration. The only maintenance events
> that require Amazon RDS to take your DB Instance offline are scale compute
> operations (which generally take only a few minutes from start-to-finish) or
> required software patching. Required patching is automatically scheduled
> only for patches that are security and durability related. Such patching
> occurs infrequently (typically once every few months) and should seldom
> require more than a fraction of your maintenance window. If you do not
> specify a preferred weekly maintenance window when creating your DB
> Instance, a 30 minute default value is assigned. If you wish to modify when
> maintenance is performed on your behalf, you can do so by modifying your DB
> Instance in the AWS Management Console, the ModifyDBInstance API or the
> modify-db-instance command. Each of your DB Instances can have different
> preferred maintenance windows, if you so choose.

Running your DB Instance as a Multi-AZ deployment can further reduce the
impact of a maintenance event. Please refer to the Amazon RDS User Guide for
more information on maintenance operations.

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rodgerd
Out of interest, do Amazon send anything upstream to the pg team?

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bvrlt
How does this compare to Heroku PostgreSQL?

It seems to be that it's cheaper but it's hard to compare without knowing what
the Heroku instances are.

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jaequery
are there any other companies out there that provide hosting with multi-
regional failovers? i love RDS and it's fine for mission critical stuffs but
sometimes i just don't want to fork so much money on smaller projects and need
an alternative.

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edpichler
Anyone using Amazon RDS in production and satisfied?

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JoshGlazebrook
I wish Azure would launch hosted Postgres.

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IndianAstronaut
Does this indicate if it will include a REST API to build some quick
applications off of or is it easier to return a JSON from a query?

~~~
pmontra
I dont think so but you might look at
[https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1616/https://www.postg...](https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1616/https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/1616/)

