How to upgrade a postgres database from 9.3 to 9.4 on heroku?

Question

This is a question for heroku staff. I have a database running postgres 9.3. When will heroku offer 9.4 that was released last week? Is there an upgrade guide? And is there a best practice way of converting json to jsonb columns with minimum downtime? Thanks!

Answer 1

As told here, You can try out 9.4 by passing the --version=9.4 flag:

heroku addons:add heroku-postgresql:standard-0 --version=9.4

To upgrade your database:

1. dump your data
2. upgrade your postgresql heroku instance
3. update your postgresql schema (json to jsonb...)
4. reload your data

You could also try pg_upgrade.

As of 23rd of April 2015, postgresql 9.4 is available on Heroku.