Overcome 10k rows database limit on Heroku by upgrading the database plan

Over time I have collected quite a number of small Rails heroku apps. They usually start small, but overtime they hit the limit of 10k rows and it’s time to upgrade the database plan. Every time I do it, I hit the heroku documentation just to realize that their way of explaining doesn’t fit me well.

This usually means that I then google a lot and only after 10 minutes I find what I look for.

This blogpost is my attempt to make myself a quick summary of what needs to be done:

And yes, Andrzej, if you read it in the future - you do need to provision a new database to overcome the 10k limit. There’s no way of just upgrading this limit on the UI with one button.

Before I start I make sure that I don’t need to append the name of the app to each command, by:

heroku git:remote -a myapp

• create new postgres add-on (choose Hobby Basic) in UI
• heroku maintenance:on
• heroku pg:copy HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_COPPER_URL HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_CHARCOAL
• heroku pg:promote HEROKU_POSTGRESQL_CHARCOAL
• heroku maintenance:off
• remove old Postgres add-on