Gigalixir offers free postgres databases for users. The free tier databases are not suitable for production environments. Please see Limitations for further details.

Creating a Free Database

To create a free tier database, run:

gigalixir pg:create --free

This command will create the DATABASE_URL environment variable if it does not already exist. Additionally if the POOL_SIZE environment variable is not set, this will set it to 2.

IMPORTANT
Make sure you set applications pool_size in prod.exs to utilize the POOL_SIZE environment variable. The free tier database only allows 2 concurrent connections.

Listing your Databases

List databases by running:

gigalixir pg

Limitations

In free tier, the database is a free multi-tenant postgres database cluster with shared CPU, memory, and disk, which is not suitable for production use.

The free tier database is limited to 2 connections, 10,000 rows, and no backups. Idle connections are terminated after 5 minutes.

Free tier databases attached to applications that are inactive for an extended period of time will be destroyed.

You can only have one free tier database per application.

For a comparison between the free tier and the standard tier databases, see Database Tiers.

Migrating to Standard Tier

If you started out with a free tier database and then upgraded to the standard tier, we highly recommend you migrate to a standard tier database.

The standard tier databases support encryption, backups, extensions, functions, triggers, and dedicated cpu, memory, & disk. There are no row limits, connection limits, and they are automatically scalable.
Standard tier databases are encrypted at rest.

For information on upgrading your account, see upgrade account.

Unfortunately, we can’t automatically migrate your free tier db to a standard tier db. You’ll have to

  1. pg_dump the free database.
  2. Delete the free database with gigalixir pg:destroy --help.
    • Note: postgres may make you scale down to 0 app replicas to do this step, so you’ll have some downtime.
  3. Create the standard tier database with gigalixir pg:create.
  4. Restore the data with psql or pg_restore. You can find the url to use with gigalixir pg once the standard tier database is created.

Please don’t hesitate to Contact Us if you need help with this migration process.

Standard tier databases still have connection limits but they are much more generous.

Install a Postgres Extension

Note
Free Databases do not support extensions - except for citext - which is preinstalled. For more information, see Database Tier Comparison.

Destroying a Free Database

Delete your free tier database by running:

gigalixir pg:destroy -d $DATABASE_ID
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