

Heroku Postgres: SQL Database-as-a-Service - tilt
http://postgres.heroku.com/

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modoc
I've seen a lot of "Cloud" database services lately, and while I love the
general idea, from what I've seen in real life, for any serious db use, the
impact of network latency is a HUGE problem. So unless this service happens to
be residing in the same data center as your application it doesn't seem like a
viable option.

The difference between a local DB with <2 ms latency to a remote DB with ~50
ms latency is huge. I've seen application start times go from 1-2 minutes to
20-30 minutes by pointing at a remote DB.

So if your app is even somewhat DB intensive, you really need <2 ms latency to
your DB, and if it's not DB intensive, you probably don't need all the scaling
and other infrastructure strengths these services bring to the table.

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aurynn
Well, Postgres can shine here if you can do a fair amount of processing inside
of a stored procedure. The sproc takes care of lifting, the client can be
(fairly) limited in the transformations it applies, and the network latency of
repeatedly going to the DB is lessened.

This is, naturally, very application-dependent.

~~~
eftpotrm
Not just Postgres; any database server in which you can do either stored
procedures or submit arbitrary batches of SQL statements rather than just
individual queries will let you do this. I routinely do in MS SQL Server, for
example, and have worked on multiple projects where the ability to do this was
utterly critical to overall performance.

To be perfectly honest, I'd consider any database server where I couldn't do
this to be something of a toy because of the restrictions it places on overall
app performance. It might be OK in SQLite or Access but a _real_ database?
Sorry, no, come back when you've finished the thing please.

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CarlHoerberg
Disclaimer: I own Cloud Postgres

Soon to be released: <https://www.cloudpostgres.com/>

Lower prices

PostgreSQL 9.1

Optional PGPool in front of the replicas for load balancing

Multiple datacenters

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sjs382
I think this is amazing, and immediately had a project in mind for this. But
then, I looked at their pricing: $200/mo at the lowest price point.

It's still incredibly affordable, but not for what I had in mind. I wish they
had lower levels so I could play.

~~~
Anjin
I'm guessing that they will shortly as it seems like it is a big market hole
to plug. I'd bet that since the lowest priced dedicated DB for a heroku app is
$200, they've just moved that functionality over.

There's probably some complexity in getting shared cheaper DBs available that
we don't know about.

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jaylevitt
I wonder if they have any "special sauce" in running PostgreSQL on EC2, or if
the real value is in the easy provisioning? We're running PG 9.0 on EC2 now
via EBS, and everything I've read says it's tough to get it performant - even
with large volumes and RAID 10, you still get spikes when your virtualization
neighbors slam the disk.

~~~
mark_l_watson
Someone at Heroku wrote a very useful article a few years ago on getting
around the pain points of EBS, using RAID on EBS, etc. (This is probably the
article I
remembered:[http://orion.heroku.com/past/2009/7/29/io_performance_on_ebs...](http://orion.heroku.com/past/2009/7/29/io_performance_on_ebs/))

~~~
moe
I/O performance is still abysmal even on their largest instance type when
striping over 20 EBS volumes (I benchmarked that a while back). And we _still_
noticed a high variance in I/O performance during peak hours despite the
striping.

Any recent dedicated server with 16 spindles will completely annihilate EBS in
terms of IOPS. And that's with plain old spinning rust - add some SSDs and EBS
ain't even in the same ballpark anymore.

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mark_l_watson
I wish that they also sold their minimal shared 20GB $15/month database plan
as a separate service (i.e., being able to access it from your own EC2
instances and not just from Heroku deployed apps).

I have a use case for a low volume app that I would like to host on Heroku,
but have other software also have access to the database, without resorting to
the obvious workarounds.

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esja
Cheapest plan: $200/month. That seems a bit high... what competes with this?

~~~
bdotdub
When you think about all the setup, SysAdmin stuff, backups, scaling, etc
you'll avoid, $200 a month ($2.4k) is pretty cheap to be able to just switch a
scalable db on at a moments notice.

~~~
jbigelow76
$200 is cheap but I'm hoping they eventually put out an option closer to the
$40/mo price point just so I can play around with Postgre (I'm currently a MS
SQLServer guy that wants to start branching out). I don't want to spin up a
new AWS and waste time with configuration and other things and don't want to
worry about hosing a currently running instance just to have a new sandbox to
play in. I'd pay a reasonable amount to have something akin to a cheap "test"
instance in exchange for giving up things like an SLA or dedicated support.

~~~
einhverfr
If you want to just play around with it, why not download and install it? No
charge for that.....

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jtchang
I don't know about you guys but one of the cheapest optimizations you can do
is making sure your database and application server are "close" to each other.

Does a cloud database service make sense? Maybe. Databases have gotten easier
and easier to setup. In addition they are quite optimized in terms of
processing power. I'm not sure I want to give up control my database just yet.

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tlogan
Hmm.. It seems expensive. For this price I would chose Oracle Database RDS.
Small Oracle DB instance is ~120/month on AWS.

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KaiX
why is PostgreSQL instead of MySQL? What are the advantages of Postgres over
MySQL in DBaaS implementation?

I've seen some Database-as-a-service projects and all of them chooses
PostgreSQL.

~~~
einhverfr
Probably because for the sorts of applications dbaas implementations target,
PostgreSQL dominates the market among open source solutions.

MySQL is very popular on the web site, but as a database serving multiple
applications from the same db, PostgreSQL has been the de facto choice in the
open source world since I have been working with db's (at least the last 12
years).

