Postgres 16 is now in Beta on Heroku Postgres
Change effective on 15 April 2024
PostgreSQL 16 is now available in beta on Heroku, bringing several notable features and performance improvements to our managed PostgreSQL database service. The beta provides an easy way for customers to try out the new release. PostgreSQL 15 continues to be the default version 15 for new databases until we make version 16 generally available.
Read the PostgreSQL project’s release notes for version 16 here.
Running PostgreSQL 16 on Heroku Postgres
To provision a new database with PostgreSQL 16, you can pass the --version 16 flag:
$ heroku addons:create heroku-postgresql --version 16
You can also use pg:upgrade and pg:copy to upgrade your database to PostgreSQL 16. You can test on your existing data by forking your database and following the pg:upgrade process.
PostgreSQL 13 Deprecation Note
To provide the best developer experience on Heroku, we’ll deprecate PostgreSQL 13 when PostgreSQL 16 becomes generally available per our policy.
PostGIS Upgrades
PostGIS 2.x is only supported on PostgreSQL 13 and earlier. Installing the PostGIS extension on PG 16 installs PostGIS 3 by default. Upgrading your database via pg:upgrade also upgrades the PostGIS version to 3.3.