It's been reliably fast, our DB response times are typically between 3 and 4 ms, though at the moment our DB is overpowered as we haven't yet transitioned our t

It's been reliably fast, our DB response times are typically between 3 and 4 ms, though at the moment our DB is overpowered as we haven't yet transitioned our truly DB intensive stuff onto it quite yet (we're on a Fugu, which is a High CPU Medium, and the dataset we're using easily fits in memory). That being said, working on Postgres has been noticably faster and more pleasant than MySQL. Complex queries in MySQL didn't benchmark as well as they did in Postgres. As far as the shared plans go, we use a cheap shared (koi) DB for our staging stuff, it's been snappy enough, even when re-syncing it with our production DB which obviously puts on a massive write load, but I couldn't really extrapolate much from that, and I have no idea how variable the performance winds up being with multi-tenancy on the DB. BTW, one of the joys of heroku really is db:push and pull. I can easily do: heroku db:pull #Pull production database onto local machine heroku db:push --app mystagingapp #Push the local DB onto the staging heroku db Just be sure to do this with a script, the last you ever want to do is push your dev DB to the production site.