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Database

Heroku Postgres 17 with the New Upgrade Process: Faster Performance, Easier Upgrade

We’re excited to announce the general availability of Heroku Postgres version 17, packed with new features and enhancements to your database performance. And that’s not all – we’re also introducing a game-changing feature that streamlines your upgrade experience. This new method of version upgrade is now the default, so you can try it to upgrade to Postgres 17!

Postgres 17: Powering your applications with enhanced performance and security

Before we dive into the …

Planning Your PostgreSQL Migration: Best Practices and Key Considerations

Your organization may have many reasons to move a cloud service from one provider to another. Maybe you’ve found a better performance-versus-cost balance elsewhere. Maybe you’re trying to avoid vendor lock-in. Whatever your reasons, the convenience and general interoperability of cloud services today put you in the driver’s seat. You get to piece together the tech stack and the cloud provider(s) that best align with your business.

This includes where you turn for your PostgreSQL database.

If you’re considering migrating your Postgres database to a different cloud provider, such as Heroku, the process might seem daunting. You’re concerned about the risk of data loss or the impact of extended downtime. Are the benefits worth the effort and the risk?

Introducing New Heroku Postgres Essential Plans Built On Amazon Aurora

We’re thrilled to launch our new Heroku Postgres Essential database plans. These plans have pgvector support, no row count limits, and come with a 32 GB option. We deliver exceptional transactional query performance with Amazon Aurora as the backing infrastructure. One of our beta customers said:

“The difference was noticeable right from the start. Heroku Postgres running on Aurora delivered a boost in speed, allowing us to query and process our data faster.”

Our …

Evolving the Backend Storage for Platform Metrics

One of our most important goals at Heroku is to be boring. Don’t get us wrong, we certainly hope that you’re excited about the Heroku developer experience — as heavy users of Heroku ourselves, we certainly are! But, even more so, we hope that you don’t have to spend all that much time thinking about Heroku. We want you to be able to spend your time thinking about the awesome, mission-critical things you’re building with Heroku, rather than worrying about the security, reliability, or performance of the underlying infrastructure they run on.

Enhancing Heroku Postgres with pgvector: Generating AI Insights

We’re pleased to introduce the pgvector extension on Heroku Postgres. In an era where large language models (LLMs) and AI applications are paramount, pgvector provides the essential capability for performing high-dimensional vector similarity searches. This allows Heroku Postgres to quickly find similar data points in complex data, which is great for applications like recommendation systems and prompt engineering for LLMs. As of today, pgvector is fully compatible with all Production-tier databases running Postgres 15 …

Connection Pooling for Heroku Postgres Is Now Generally Available

We are excited to announce that we are moving Connection Pooling for Heroku Postgres into GA. Connection Pooling unlocks the ability to use up to 10,000 client connections to a Heroku Postgres Database, without adversely impacting performance on the database. This will unlock more complex and higher scale applications with simpler architectures on the Heroku Platform.

Over the years, one of the factors that you have to consider when scaling applications is pressure on the …

The Curious Case of the Table-Locking UPDATE Query

Update: On closer inspection, the lock type was not on the table, but on a tuple. For more information on this locking mechanism see the internal Postgresql tuple locking documentation. Postgres does not have lock promotion as suggested in the debugging section of this post.

I maintain an internal-facing service at Heroku that does metadata processing. It’s not real-time, so there’s plenty of slack for when things go wrong. Recently I discovered a Postgres …

Announcing Heroku Data Services Integrations Using mutual TLS and PrivateLink

Today, we’re thrilled to announce four new trusted data integrations that allow data to flow seamlessly and securely between Heroku and external resources in public clouds and private data centers:

  • Heroku Postgres via mutual TLS
  • Heroku Postgres via PrivateLink
  • Apache Kafka on Heroku via PrivateLink
  • Heroku Redis via PrivateLink

These integrations expand Heroku’s security and trust boundary to cover the connections to external resources and the data that passes through them. They enable true multi-cloud …

Up to 75% Faster Maintenances with Heroku Postgres and Redis Premium Plans

As outlined in a previous blog post, Heroku Data services undergo routine maintenances for security and patching. In this post, we describe the process used to minimize downtime for Heroku Postgres and Heroku Redis premium ‘High Availability’ plans and how we optimized the process to perform up to 75% faster.

Data Services Architecture

High availability plans for Postgres and Redis are designed to have two database instances running at the same time. One is …

Why Frequent Maintenances Are Essential for Secure Heroku Data Services

There are many reasons to choose Heroku Data services, but keeping the services you use secure and up-to-date rank near the top. This foundation of trust is the most important commitment we make to our customers, and frequent and timely maintenances are one way we deliver on this promise.

We do everything we can to minimize downtime, which is typically between 10 – 60 seconds per maintenance. There are ways for you to minimize disruption too (see the tips and tricks below). The rest of the post explains how we think about Heroku Data maintenances, how we perform them, and when we perform them.

An Ounce of Prevention…

Hackers exploit known but unpatched vulnerabilities or out-of-date software. Minimizing the time between when a patch or update becomes available and when it gets deployed is the most effective means of limiting damage. There’s nothing worse than seeing your company’s high-profile breach at the top of Hacker News and the Wall Street Journal.

This business and reputation risk is real. Like you, we’re faced with the same choice. We believe it’s best to budget some prevention time upfront for patching and updating data services. Otherwise, an incident may cost us (and you) a larger amount of remediation time and effort, to say nothing of the potential damage done to our (and your) brand, business, and customers.

That’s why we invest significant engineering, security, and operations effort into creating a proactive security posture that keeps your stack up-to-date through frequent, scheduled maintenances.

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