RDS for Postgres

We are pleased to announce the general availability of a new Postgres role.

When it comes to MySQL vs Postgres, you’ll find another holy war between quasi-religious fanatics of both technologies, similar to what you’d find between Windows and Linux. Or to the layman, Snickers vs Mars.

Postgres now auto-scales on Scalr

That said, there are notable technical differences between both databases.

WHY POSTGRES

First, Postgres lets you perform DDL changes (a.k.a. schemas, or if you are more familiar with Excel, changes to column names and spreadsheet names) as transactions. This means that either the schema change is successfully and entirely done or else it rolls back to its previous state. This wiki goes more in depth on the process.

Why is this important? When you have a large database (or worse—lots of large ones in a replicated + sharded cluster), then the probability of a failure that requires tedious manual repair increases to threat level why’s-the-rum-gone. Running migrations as transactions means that if there’s a failure, you can simply run the migration again. MySQL 5.6 still doesn’t support this.

Postgres also allows you to create indexes (to speed up queries on the indexed column) without write-locking the table (which prevents you from writing new data but still lets you read from it).

Here’s a good comparison of MySQL and Postgres from Quora and a blog post on why Heroku chose Postgres.

POSTGRES BY SCALR

This Scalr Role comes with the same automatic backups and recovery that you get with RDS (but on Postgres), only with added auto-scaling (which RDS lacks). Here are a few screenshots:

Configure postgres backups from here

This Postgres role doesn’t support Configuration Presets yet, so if you need them soon, let us know at suggestions@scalr.com.

Like all database roles, the options menu contains a status page.

Postgres status

This status page allows you to check on the databases’ replication status, last backup (a dump), and last data bundle (binary snapshot).

Easily check Postgres operational status

HOW TO GET STARTED

We’ve prepared a few images for you (but not on every infrastructure cloud). If you can’t find one that suits you (maybe you want to deploy on Rackspace, maybe you want another OS), you can use the Role Builder. Find the Role Builder under Roles in the top menu and use our Chef recipes to create some automatically for you.

Deploy Postgres in any cloud with the Role Builder