

Postgres 9.2 – The Database You Helped Build - Pr0
https://postgres.heroku.com/blog/past/2012/12/6/postgres_92_now_available/

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jedberg
When I was running the Postgres databases for reddit, I was constantly seeking
people who could teach me better ways to tune Postgres on AWS. Most people I
would meet would just regurgitate what anyone could learn with a day or two of
googling and reading.

At one point I got scared by the prospect that I might be an expert on
Postgres on AWS, because frankly I didn't know all that much about it and
thought we were doomed if that was really the case.

Then I went over had lunch with the Heroku team, and it was eye opening. These
guys truly knew how to run Postgres on AWS (and presumably still do).

I can't think of another org that is moving Postgres on AWS forward better
than Heroku.

~~~
wooster
Any insights you can share? I'm looking at this now, and it's not encouraging
compared to dedicated hardware.

~~~
pvh
You could always use Heroku Postgres. Our whole reason to exist is to ensure
you can work fearlessly with your data.

At this point, I think running your own data infrastructure is like having a
generator in your garage instead of using the power grid.

~~~
bradgessler
This is a bad metaphor. Utility computing isn't quite up to the same level as
electrical utilities. Heroku has suffered from more downtime in the past year
than I have power outages. Also, most commercial operations that tap into
public utilities have some sort of backup plan for when the power goes out. A
dramatic example of that is the power staying on in the Goldman Sacs building
during Hurricane Sandy ([http://www.inquisitr.com/381743/hurricane-sandy-
rages-but-th...](http://www.inquisitr.com/381743/hurricane-sandy-rages-but-
the-lights-stay-on-at-goldman-sachs/))

More visibility would be greatly appreciated into what you're doing behind the
scenes and increase your customers' confidence and expectations of using the
Heroku pg cloud service. I hope you provide more depth to future answers as
opposed to, "Just trust us". I've found that in practice, things never work
out that way.

~~~
pvh
That's a fair criticism - thanks for the rebuttal. (Edit) Also - what kind of
visibility are you looking for that we don't offer today? Please feel free to
email me (my email is rather guessable) with whatever you have.

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riffraff
I just started a pet project some days ago where I had to store some JSON
stuff and was sad to find heroku postgres did not support it yet.

And now it does :)

~~~
davidw
I wonder how often it'd actually come up that you could get stuff through your
application layer into the database and/or back out without wanting to tweak
it first. Where i have Rails JSON api's, I usually do some
tweaking/modification of the JSON that comes out, for instance.

~~~
riffraff
I don't think I'd ever want to _serve_ json from the db, and as you say, I'd
tweak the data for common usage anyway.

But my use case is the opposite: I am storing exactly the data coming from
external APIs.

My table has some fields I already extracted from the JSON data, cause I need
them now, yet I don't want to throw away the full data, as I may need it in
the future.

So, I was storing the original JSON as text.

But, having support for the API format in the db itself is much better, as I
can also actually query and manipulate this data without pulling all the text
fields in my client code.

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zrail
I hadn't seen anything about pg_stat_statements before. That will be extremely
helpful to have around.

~~~
pvh
Here's a little teaser: <https://github.com/will/datascope>

~~~
zrail
Oh man that's super cool!

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mfenniak
Does Heroku's Postgres implementation run with a server-side connection
pooling tool like pgpool or pgbouncer?

~~~
pvh
We don't provide server-side connection pooling today, no. It adds too many
gotchas to be universally applicable and has had too few use cases to reach
the top of our TODO list. We do hear from time to time from people who want it
though, so it's certainly not out of the question.

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cmaggard
We just upgraded our database plan on Monday. Guess we're doing it again soon
to get on the new hotness!

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cmalpeli
can't tell from this, but will existing Postgres databases at Heroku be
automatically upgraded, or do you need to provision a new instance and migrate
the data?

~~~
pvh
We figure reliability of your database as one of our chief missions. To that
end, we prefer not to do anything which could even remotely be a possible
cause of operational issues. Since changing over to a new version is easy, we
tend to let users do so at their leisure. That said, in the event of a major
0-day we could be forced to migrate people, but it hasn't happened yet.

