Alternatives to Google Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL

I could spin up an Amazon EC2 instance and install PostgreSQL myself, review latest configuration best practices, sort Amazon EBS storage for data, set up a snapshot process etc.

Alternatively I could use Amazon RDS, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL or Heroku Postgres and have most of that work handled for me, by a team of world experts...

PostgreSQL Heroku Heroku Postgres Node.js Knex.js

Last week we rolled out a simple patch that decimated the response time of a Postgres query crucial to Checkly. It quite literally went from an average of ~100ms with peaks to 1 second to a steady 1ms to 10ms.

However, that patch was just the last step of a longer journey:

1. I looked at what API endpoints were using which queries and how their response time grew over time. Specifically the customer facing API endpoints that are directly responsible for rendering the first dashboard page of the product are crucial.

2. I looked at the Heroku metrics such as those reported by heroku pg:outlier and cross references that with "slowest response time" statistics.

3. I reproduced the production situation as best as possible on a local development machine and test my hypothesis that an composite index on a uuid field and a timestampz field would reduce response times.

This method secured the victory and we rolled out a new index last week. Response times plummeted. Read the full story in the blog post.

I could spin up an Amazon EC2 instance and install PostgreSQL myself, review latest configuration best practices, sort Amazon EBS storage for data, set up a snapshot process etc.

Alternatively I could use Amazon RDS, Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL or Heroku Postgres and have most of that work handled for me, by a team of world experts...

We are embarking on a project of building a Django web application on Microsoft Azure. The debate holding us back is whether to with Azure SQL Database or Azure Database for PostgreSQL. From all the tutorials and video tutorials they use Azure Database for PostgreSQL but one team member is insisting on Azure SQL Database. Please advise of what to consider if I capitulate what database do I need to install locally to get the project moving.