Matt Soldo (Product Manager, Heroku Postgres)
Try: https://addons.heroku.com/justonedb or https://addons.heroku.com/cleardb
Besides being MySQL under the hood, which has known flaws compared to PostgreSQL, with Amazon RDS you get to be completely worry free. You can also do backups on Amazon's S3 and setting up a replicated slave is literally just a push of a button.
Also, I'd hope they will give a few months warning before flipping the switch completely, similar to how the hoptoad/airbrake switch went.
Funny you should say that, as I was involved in the hotpoad/airbrake transition and am now involved in the Heroku postgres one. The transition will be as smooth as we possibly can, no data will be lost, there will be plenty of time to move your data, and easy ways of doing so.
We are really excited about offering a development and free 9.1 postgres service, a huge step forward from the current 8.3 shared database service, and are looking forward to moving people over to the new instances.
I appreciate what they are doing, but this is a step back for how I utilize Heroku.
Maybe it's just me, but if you're going to announce the depreciation of a solution at a TBD date with no indication of what the advanced warning period would be, and this is the only thing you announce along side that, I think it's fair for people to ask about the gap they see. The announcement of any planned non-dev plans should have been right alongside the announcement that removes functionality; otherwise anxiety is a given.
Besides considerably better production/dev parity in the higher-level paid plans versus the aging shared Postgres 8.3, the biggest feature I'm excited about is being able to connect directly to the shared database such as via "psql". One can also run pg_dump/pg_restore directly to their local environment, which for development purposes with small amounts of data can result in drastically faster backup/restore cycles between one's computer and Heroku than what PGBackups can provide.
Disclaimer: I work for Heroku, on data stuff.
