Ruby on Rails hosting provider Heroku, one of the best cloud hosting companies, is adding a new service – PostgreSQL Database-as-a-Service. After starting out as Ruby on Rails hosting shop, Heroku added support to other languages Python, Scala and Java on its hosting platform.
Apart from core hosting, Heroku provides many of the advance features like Auto Scaling, Deployment Stacks, HTTP caching etc. The partner eco-system with add-ons like New Relic Performance Monitoring, Redis and Mongo NoSQL databases, SMS Gateways, Billing Gateways add powerful functionality to Web Applications easily.
PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object relation database system. PostgreSQL is supported by most modern programming languages – including Perl, Python, Ruby, Scala, Go, Tcl, C/C++, Java, .Net, and Javascript. It also provides high level of security, reliability and data integrity compared to other open source offerings. And did we mention it is our favorite?
Heroku platform uses PostgreSQL as core database since 2007 for all Applications hosted on it. This service gives option to use Heroku database service by Applications hosted on any other cloud platform like Amazon or Rackspace. In announcing Heroku PostgreSQL as a database service suddenly makes Heroku as a significant competitor to Amazon RDS, Database.com and Azure. Its no more a closed Ruby shop.
According to Heroku “Heroku PostgreSQL creates multiple, geographically distributed copies of all data changes as they are written. These copies are constantly checked for consistency and corruption. If a meteor were to wipe out the east coast, you won’t lose your data.”
Setting up Heroku PostgreSQL database is three simple step process
- Register or sign-in with your Heroku account
- Navigate the database dashboard and click the “+” in the Your Database header. Choose your choice of plan and thus database would be created in next 3-5 minutes.
- Once your database is available click on it to view details. The connection setting section contains all the required information like user-name, password, host, database name and port which can be used to connect the database using any PostgreSQL compatible client.
Heroku database as a service comes with many different plans ranging from $200/month plan with 1.7GB cache to $6,400/month with 68GB cache.
More details about pricing can be checked here http://postgres.heroku.com/pricing
More information can be found on Heroku’s site
http://postgres.heroku.com/