PostgreSQL 13 now in Beta on Heroku Postgres

Change effective on 17 December 2020

Earlier this year, PostgreSQL 13.0 was released. Today, we are excited to announce PostgreSQL 13 is available in beta on Heroku, bringing a number of notable feature and performance improvements to our managed PostgreSQL database service.

The beta provides customers who want to try out the new release an easy way to do so, while customers who are happy with the current version can continue to stay on version 12 until we make version 13 generally available. New databases will continue to default to version 12 until we release version 13 to GA.

The PostgreSQL project’s release notes for version 13 can be found here: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/13/release-13.html.

To provision a new database with PostgreSQL 13, you can pass the --version 13 flag, like so:

heroku addons:create heroku-postgresql --version 13

Testing

You can test on your existing data by making a fork withpg:fork. Upgrading with pg:upgrade will be available further along in the beta period.

Additionally, you may use Postgres 13 in the Heroku CI buildpack by updating POSTGRESQL_VERSION in app.json.