

Heroku Postgres - GIS Support Now Available - Lightning
https://blog.heroku.com/archives/2013/4/30/heroku_postgres_geospatial_support_now_available

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niels
Wow, We were one day from migrating away from Heroku because of this exact
issue. I even made a custom Postgis build for dotcloud that also has
extensions such as HStore. <https://github.com/resmio/postgresql-on-dotcloud>.
Guess we have time to reconsider now.

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craigkerstiens
Here's the more details announcement post which contains more detail around
technical benefits -
[https://postgres.heroku.com/blog/past/2013/4/30/building_loc...](https://postgres.heroku.com/blog/past/2013/4/30/building_location_based_apps_with_postgis/)

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annymsMthd
I was using PostGIS for vehicle tracking at my last job. PostGIS made it
really simple by allowing me to boil everything down to simple geometry. The
performance is amazing. The CTO told me I was doing it wrong and I should be
using some homebrew solution in the middle tier that would do a comparison of
2,000+ points each GPS update. Why reinvent the wheel? Let the experts handle
the geospatial functions.

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salman89
I have found a general lack of hosted PostGIS solutions and would have loved
if this was around 6 months ago. Cartodb felt more like a mapping solution
than a spatial database solution. SpacialDB (<https://spacialdb.com/>) was the
only thing I could find, but their pricing plans vs storage limits didn't make
sense (I was loading up OSM data - full dataset is really big). Ended up
installing PostGIS on an EC2 instance manually, worked OK for development
purposes but I would have never felt comfortable pushing that into production.

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255martyn
Is it possible to use this independently of other heroku services? We're on
ec2, but this is a perfect fit.

Edit: If this is up to date <https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dynos>

Then heroku uses ec2, so it should be possible.

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plasma
Yes, <https://postgres.heroku.com/> its a stand-alone service (thats run by
Heroku), you don't need to be on the Heroku platform to use it.

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bratsche
Very nice! Their documentation on using it with Rails isn't very useful, but
at least it points users to the right gem to install and use so they can read
more about it on that github page.

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craigkerstiens
Product manager for Heroku Postgres here, we've added a direct link to the gem
docs. In general our hopes weren't to recycle the already good documentation
out there, but reference it as that provides the right guide for actually
taking advantage of functionality.

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csmatt
Wow, I was just recently looking for an alternative to Heroku because I
noticed my GeoDjango app with PostGIS wouldn't run on it. Very good timing!

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pselbert
PostGIS has been available on Heroku for a little while now, you just had to
be using a Ronin ($200/mo) plan or above. We were just about to roll out some
geo-location features and were caught by this. To stage the new features we
were forced to upgrade the staging database to Ronin level, which is absolute
overkill.

I'll be pleased to knock that back down a few levels.

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scdoshi
Awesome. We've been waiting for this for a while.

