Is the database working as expected?

Ben Halpern Oct 16 ・1 min read

#meta #postgres

If you are reading this, the answer is yes.

We just updated our Postgres version, so I'm thankful nothing went wrong.

DISCUSS (22)

rhymes

Oct 16

I'm so happy we've upgraded to PostgreSQL 11, I can finally start using all the features under the sun ☀️

😂

Michael Kohl

Oct 16

You know that less than 2 weeks ago they released Postgres 12, so you'll have to do without some of the features under the sun 😜

rhymes

Oct 16

I know, but Heroku prudently keeps that for 3 months in beta.

I guess we'll have to upgrade again next year :P

Renato Byrro

Oct 16

Some features were down (now good) for a few minutes:

Dashboard inaccessible
Wouldn't save changes to an article
Unpublished articles were not accessible (reading draft or editing)

Yes, guilty, I'm a heavy user and needed all this during your 2-minute migration window 😊

Ben Halpern

Author

Oct 16

We could have optimized for a time where we had less traffic, like late Friday night, but since we hadn't performed this kind of upgrade before we felt like optimizing for a time where most of the team could be online and alert made sense.

The next time we need scheduled downtime (or, gasp! face unscheduled downtime) we will likely have way more users online at all times. This kind of thing isn't getting easier.

Oct 16

Fortnite style!

Renato Byrro

Oct 16

No worries at all 😉 👍

Was only reporting because I thought it could make it easier for you guys to track any improvement opportunities

Emilie Gervais

Oct 16

workin' ;)

Oct 16

Just curious why dev is using postgres vs mysql. What are the benefits?

Michael Kohl

Oct 17

You phrased this question like MySQL is some sort of standard and one needs a specific reason to use something else. It's not, and especially in the Ruby/Rails community many people tend to gravitate towards Postgres by default. That said for your average CRUD app written in MVC framework/language of choice, there probably isn't much practical difference between them.

You can find a relatively comprehensive comparison here:

postgresqltutorial.com/postgresql-...

For me the reasons I generally choose Postgres are:

Advanced data types (e.g. hstore, array)
More flexible default values (e.g. generating them from functions)
Materialized views (possible with workarounds in MySql/MariaDB, but I'd rather have them natively)
Better indexing options

Oct 17

Thanks for the detailed explanation! I don't come from the ROR community so Postgres is foreign to me...and I know a lot of people that fall inthe same boat. Your answer was helpful, so thanks.