Heroku Doubles Down On Open Source Database Cloud

Grazed from Wired. Author: Klint Finley.

One of the goals of cloud computing is to cut down on the work it takes to maintain a company’s underlying hardware and software infrastructure. Servers are virtualized, and tools like Puppet and Chef make it easier to manage and configure hundreds or even thousands of servers. Everything from application design to storage management is being rethought thanks to the cloud.

Database management systems are no exception. Salesforce.com has been particularly bullish on a database called PostgreSQL, an open source alternative to Oracle’s flagship database products that can also compete with so-called “NoSQL” databases modeled on the mega-data storage systems created by the likes of Google and Amazon. This year, Salesforce hired Tom Lane, one of the core contributors to Postgres, to develop the open source project and build some internal projects for the company…

And today, Heroku — a cloud computing company owned by Salesforce — launched a new version of its hosted Postgres service. Heroku offers what’s called a platform-as-a-service — a way of building applications in the cloud, letting developers focus on writing code instead of managing servers. The company announced simplified pricing and plans for the Postgres service, but more importantly, it introduced new features such as the ability to “rollback” the database to a previous state and a series of automatic notifications for improving the design of databases. In other words, Heroku is trying to automate more of the core tasks of database administrators…

Read more from the source @ http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/11/heroku-postgres/