PostgreSQL support is now live on AppFog!

As many of you already know, PostgreSQL is a phenomenal database technology. It’s an established and battle-tested ACID-compliant object-relational database with thousands of contributors in its open source community. For any PaaS seeking to offer a fully-rounded palette of database options to developers, Postgres is an absolute must-have. That’s why we’re thrilled to announce today that AppFog now supports Postgres in beta.

Offering PostgreSQL support is a special treat for us at AppFog because we use it fairly extensively under the hood. Amongst the many great database technologies currently available, it’s a personal favorite for several members of our dev team. We use it in particular for managing significant portions of our user system, and we rely on it extensively as a queryable read-through/write-through cache.

For AppFog users, linking up with a Postgres database is extremely easy. If you’re coding a Ruby Sinatra application, for example, you need only one Ruby gem (the “pg” gem), and establishing a connection can be done in just a few lines of code:

require "pg"

services = JSON.parse(ENV['VCAP_SERVICES'])
postgresql_key = services.keys.select { |svc| svc =~ /postgresql/i }.first
postgresql = services[postgresql_key].first['credentials']
postgresql_conn = {:host => postgresql['hostname'], :port => postgresql['port'], :username => postgresql['user'], :password => postgresql['password'], :dbname => postgresql['name']}
connection = PG.connect(postgresql_conn)

Clearly, this is just one example in one programming language, and even if you’re working in Ruby, your Postgres connection might look very different. But it needn’t be more complex than this. A few lines of code and the vast power of Postgres is at your fingertips.

From the very beginning, AppFog has supported MySQL and MongoDB, and PostgreSQL brings AppFog’s database offerings up to three. For us, this is just the beginning. In the coming months, we are planning on adding support to a number of other data storage technologies, including Redis (which is now one of our very highest priorities), neo4j, Memcached, and CouchDB. We will also very soon be updating our MongoDB offering to MongoDB 2.0.

We’ve been seeing staggering amounts of innovation in the database space in the last few years. New so-called NoSQL databases are emerging practically by the day, alongside hybrid columnar/non-relational options, graph databases, and many others. Enabling you to tap into that innovation by offering an expanding palette of database tools is one of the things that we’re most excited about here at AppFog.

For now, give Postgres a shot on AppFog. You will not be disappointed.

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