Heroku Postgres

Re:Heroku Postgres by olefoo on Tuesday August 30, 2011 @01:42PM (#2942436)

Just a little usability nit, is the pricing per month, per year, lifetime?

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.

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.

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Re:Heroku Postgres by pvh on Tuesday August 30, 2011 @03:02PM (#2942761)

I would say that at this point you're right, we're probably not right yet for companies subject to HIPAA or PCI regulation.

The advanced Postgres datatypes are pretty much my favorite thing in the world. We use HStore internally all over the place, as well as some more exciting projects that we haven't said too much about yet. As I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, if you're interested in trying out some of those extensions, contact me directly.

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Re:Heroku Postgres by olefoo on Wednesday August 31, 2011 @01:00AM (#2944397)

I'm a real fan of PostGIS and like ltree and hstore a lot. Heroku isn't quite right for my needs at this time, but I would definitely consider it if I had a use case that needed an extremely fast public facing postgres installation.

I am curious as to whether you do pro-rated pricing?

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Re:Heroku Postgres by sabman on Wednesday August 31, 2011 @11:00AM (#2945810)

@Olefoo you can get PostGIS on Heroku via SpacialDB. SpacialDB is cloud hosted PostGIS and a convenient RESTful API. We have a heroku addon too currently in private beta. Check out our devcenter here: http://devcenter.spacialdb.com/ and let us know if you would like a beta invite.

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Re:Heroku Postgres by pvh on Wednesday August 31, 2011 @02:03AM (#2944506)

As of today, we only charge for the time you use. I don't imagine we'd ever need to change that, but never is a long time.

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Re:Heroku Postgres by olefoo on Wednesday August 31, 2011 @03:13AM (#2944630)

That is interesting, there are times when I want to use PG as an ETL tool and take a midsized ( < 2tb data ) set and load it up and slice and dice it and produce some output for other programs and then have it go away. So, I'll keep you guys in mind.

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Re:Heroku Postgres by simonw on Tuesday August 30, 2011 @03:28PM (#2942877)

That confused me too - the https://postgres.heroku.com/pricing page should definitely mention that it's per month. I'm also not clear on the difference between the Ronin and Fugu plans, both of which are 1.7 GB of RAM but one which is twice the price of the other.

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Re:Heroku Postgres by wisty on Wednesday August 31, 2011 @02:25AM (#2944556)

They are built on different EC2 instances.

Ronin = Small Instance: 1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of local instance storage, 32-bit platform. ~$60/month spot.

Fugu = High-CPU Medium Instance: 1.7 GB of memory, 5 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2.5 EC2 Compute Units each), 350 GB of local instance storage, 32-bit platform. ~$120/month spot.

Ikea = Large Instance: 7.5 GB of memory, 4 EC2 Compute Units (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform. ~$240 / month spot.

Zilla = High-Memory Extra Large Instance: 17.1 GB memory, 6.5 ECU (2 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each), 420 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform. ~$360/month spot.

Baku = High-Memory Double Extra Large Instance: 34.2 GB of memory, 13 EC2 Compute Units (4 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each), 850 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform. ~$720/month spot.

Mecha = High-Memory Quadruple Extra Large Instance: 68.4 GB of memory, 26 EC2 Compute Units (8 virtual cores with 3.25 EC2 Compute Units each), 1690 GB of local instance storage, 64-bit platform. ~$1440/month spot.

I think Heroku will pay less than the spot price for the raw server, but fork out bandwidth, storage, EBS IO, backups and so on. Amazon sells its basic servers cheap, but virtually nothing is included.

It looks like their margins go up at Zilla, but maybe the high-RAM instances need more bandwidth and backups.

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Re:Heroku Postgres by msmith on Tuesday August 30, 2011 @02:22PM (#2942586)

I'm sure it's monthly. The price tiers are the same as the full Heroku platform (http://heroku.com/pricing), which is billed monthly.

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Re:Heroku Postgres by wtn on Tuesday August 30, 2011 @02:16PM (#2942563)

Basic plan is $200/month.

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