This is really exciting - the team behind this <i>really</i> cares about developers and their experience. They see a way things could be better, and regardless of technical difficulty, say, "why not?" Forking a db? Brilliant. Offload expensive task to passive followers? Obvious (in hindsight). Instant, brain-dead db provisioning? Of course.<p>Personally, the only terrifying thing about this is that when Heroku releases something, it's been in the works for a good long while, and they usually have a stream of incredible releases waiting right behind it. The mind boggles at what they're going to be doing next.<p>But we'll be first in line for it :)
If there is anyone from heroku reading, please pay some money to <a href="http://www.sequelpro.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.sequelpro.com/</a> developers to develop postgresql compatibility. All GUIs available on OS X for postgres are horrible
It would seem that their acquisition by SalesForce hasn't slowed them down at all, in fact I'd go as far to say that they've been even more productive since that happened. I'm curious about how that whole process has gone; has SalesForce provided more support/funding/resources? Or just removed distractions and allowed them to focus on their product?<p>Nice job Heroku.
Just a little usability nit, is the pricing per month, per year, lifetime?<p>It's not clear from the pricing page, and I'm assuming it's per month, in which case it's reasonable, especially given the value added services being offered, especially the ability to fork the database and the automated creation of read slaves.<p>It looks like a solid offering. It's probably not right for companies that are subject to HIPAA or PCI compliance requirements, and there's no information on the use of compiled extensions in the db which may limit it's utility if you're wanting to use PostGIS or other specialist datatypes.
Do they still limit the usage of user defined functions and contrib modules, or did that open up? I would love to use Heroku for some lightweight data warehousing that I've got going, but it's still pretty dependent on functions/sprocs for performance reasons.<p>I looked for any more documentation about that, but the only official word I have from them in the past is the support ticket I filed last year stating that they don't support "additions" like user defined functions or the various contrib modules.
This is really awesome, just a few downsides (for me):<p>I don't use postgres - I hope heroku expands this kind of service to more databases (although I don't think it's likely in the near future).<p>The smallest database is also pretty expensive. I wouldn't mind a cheaper plan for less resources.<p>Only being able to create one database of each size is just weird, especially if forking or following. Can anybody confirm that this is a limitation? (I only read about this from one of the other comments here)
Is this still using the EBS RAID that you guys mentioned in a blog post a while ago? If so, how do you avoid any slow I/O requests (which plague EBS) stalling all I/O to the volume?
"Forget daily backups, Continuous Protection redundantly archives data to high-durability storage as it is written, ensuring that it is safe no matter what."<p>I'm sorry, but daily backups are not only for high availability, but also for point in time recovery.<p>What if $dev drops the user table by mistake ? Do they provide backup for that ?
This is really awesome! A couple questions though:<p>* What do I do if I need to tune/configure Postgres for my workload.<p>* How is the performance of transferring all of the queries and responses across the internet?<p>Keep in mind I've never used postgres before so these may be moot points.
Although they only let you create one database per plan, you can use schemas to emulate multiple databases.<p><a href="http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/static/ddl-schemas.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/static/ddl-schemas.html</a>
Any chance of PL/python or similar?<p>I guess I'm probably one of like three users of PL/python, especially since it's untrusted. Worth a check, though!
This is ridiculous, but I would love a REST interface to a SQL server. I do a lot of AppEngine work and although I love the datastore and write super-optimal queries, I would really love the ability to pull a SQL datasource in every once in awhile.
I just realised that Heroku have a problem: when I looked at the page, and looked at the subdomain URL, I couldn't tell if this was a real offering or a fake app put up by someone else.
This is cool, seems to have a pretty fair price structure. I still don't understand their shared database pricing. 5mb for free, then $15 for 20gb. I need like 100 megs for 5 bucks.