Professional Heroku Programming

Chapter 8

Using Heroku Postgres as a Data Store for Your Heroku Applications

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Getting started with Heroku Postgres
• Understanding continuous protection
• Understanding automated health checks
• Creating a higher-availability database architecture
• Creating databases
• Forking databases
• Creating database followers
• Managing databases
• Monitoring databases
• Choosing the right plan
• Deleting databases
• Backing up data
• Importing data
• Using advanced features
• Creating a sample app

WROX.COM CODE DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

The wrox.com code downloads for this chapter are found at www.wrox.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=1118508998 on the Download Code tab. The code is in the Chapter 8 download and individually named according to the names throughout the chapter.

When creating a web-based app, you typically need some sort of persistent storage on the back end. This is especially important when developing on a platform like Heroku where dynos are ephemeral, and you cannot even rely on them to store session-based information between requests. Heroku provides a number of options for storing your data, including several data as a service (DaaS) providers that offer the advantage of not having to deal with hardware provisioning and database patching.

The most common approach is to use the built-in Postgres database service provided by Heroku. This database is durable and reliable, and leverages the highly popular PostgreSQL, which provides advanced features for enterprise data storage. Developers ...