Managed Postgres vendors

The pgurl provider copies any Postgres it can reach, and that includes the managed ones. It needs two connection strings, and on a managed Postgres the question that decides whether a setup works is which of the two the vendor can be.

This page answers that for thirteen vendors, one by one, from each vendor’s own published documentation.

What was proved, and what was not

Every verdict here was read from the vendor’s own documentation on the date recorded beside it in engine/internal/db/managed/vendors.go. No account was created on any of these thirteen services, no request was sent to any of their control planes, and no database was branched on any of them. So this page records what each vendor says its product does. It does not record what any of them did.

The two questions that are not the same question

The source is production, read once per refresh by pg_dump, which needs read access and nothing else.

The host server is where the goldens and the branches are made, and it needs a role that may CREATE DATABASE. The provider’s own documentation already says it should not be the production server.

So a vendor that refuses CREATE DATABASE is not a vendor Antifailure cannot serve. It is a vendor that cannot also be the host server. Keep it as the source, and make the host server a Postgres you administer: a container, a small instance, or the docker provider instead.

The thirteen

CoW is copy on write: whether the vendor’s own copy shares storage with its parent, so that making one does not take longer as the database grows.

Vendor	Its own mechanism	CoW	Can host goldens	Read on
Aiven for PostgreSQL	fork restored from a backup	no	yes, additional databases are supported	its page
Crunchy Bridge	fork restored from a backup, point in time	no	yes, the postgres role is a superuser	its page
DigitalOcean Managed Databases for PostgreSQL	fork restored from a backup	no	yes, a cluster holds many databases	its page
Fly Managed Postgres	fork, mechanism not published	no	unverified	its page
Heroku Postgres	fork restored from a snapshot	no	no, the assigned user may not create or drop databases	its page
Nile	none documented	no	unverified	its page
PlanetScale Postgres	branch created empty, or restored from a backup	no	yes, the default role carries CREATEDB	its page
Prisma Postgres	none documented	no	unverified	its page
Railway Postgres	none documented	no	yes, the official Postgres image and its superuser	its page
Render Postgres	point in time recovery into a new instance	no	yes, CREATE DATABASE in psql is documented	its page
Tembo Cloud	the product was withdrawn	no	no, there is no service	its page
Tiger Cloud, formerly Timescale Cloud	fork restored from a backup on paid tiers, copy on write on free	no	no, a service holds exactly one database	its page
Xata	copy on write branch	yes	unverified	its page

The link in the last column is the page the host server answer was read from. Xata is the one vendor on this list with a provider of its own, xata, because its branches are copy on write. The rest are served by pgurl. Every quote behind every verdict, and the page for each mechanism, is in engine/internal/db/managed/vendors.go.

Unverified is an answer

Four vendors carry unverified, and it is not a polite no. It means the vendor’s documentation did not answer the question on the date it was read. Fly Managed Postgres documents creating additional databases through its dashboard and flyctl and says nothing about whether a SQL role carries CREATEDB. Guessing in either direction would put an answer in this table that nobody could check.

What the engine does with this

On a host it recognises as a vendor whose documentation says no, a role without CREATEDB is refused with AF-DB-037. The message names the vendor, gives the reason, and quotes the page and the date the verdict was read, so a reader can check whether it has gone stale. It does not tell them to run ALTER ROLE, because on that vendor there is nobody who can.

af start gives the same answer without connecting to anything. Its database rung names the vendor and blocks there, so the answer reaches somebody who has not finished configuring yet.

On any other host, the refusal is AF-DB-035. It gives ALTER ROLE ... CREATEDB first, because that is the right answer on a server somebody administers, which is most of them. It also says what to do when there is no role that may grant it, because a managed Postgres the engine cannot recognise still reaches this message.

Neither refusal is decided by the table. The provider asks the server whether its role may create databases, and only a server that says no is refused. The table decides which sentence describes that refusal. A vendor that starts granting CREATEDB is never refused at all.

Heroku cannot be recognised from its hostname

A Heroku Postgres host is an EC2 name such as ec2-ADDRESS.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com, which is the name every other machine on EC2 also carries. No suffix identifies one without also claiming every self hosted Postgres on an EC2 instance, and a wrong recognition is worse than none: it would refuse, in Heroku’s name, somebody whose own server does grant CREATEDB.

So a Heroku user whose role lacks CREATEDB gets AF-DB-035, and that is why AF-DB-035 carries the second remedy. On Heroku, the second remedy is the one that works.

Tiger Cloud is recognised by its service hostname

A Tiger Cloud service is addressed as SERVICE.PROJECT.tsdb.cloud.timescale.com. That suffix is matched on a label boundary, so a host that merely ends in the same letters is not taken for Tiger Cloud.

Prisma Postgres issues two connection strings

The Prisma Console’s default is a prisma+postgres://accelerate.prisma-data.net URL, an HTTP protocol address that pg_dump cannot speak. Prisma also issues a direct TCP string on db.prisma.io, and its own documentation says to use that one with psql, pg_dump and pg_restore. Pasting the first into database.source_url_env gets AF-DB-024, which says the scheme is wrong.

What to do on each of them

Point database.source_url_env at the vendor. It is read once per refresh and needs read access only.

Point PGURL_ADMIN_URL at a Postgres that grants CREATE DATABASE. On Aiven, Crunchy Bridge, DigitalOcean, PlanetScale, Railway and Render that can be a service at the same vendor. On Heroku and Tiger Cloud it cannot. On Fly, Nile, Prisma and Xata the documentation did not say, and the server’s own answer when the provider starts is the one that counts.