How to setup new Redshift database with Heroku/Rails 4 app

Question

I have been using Heroku-postgres as my database for my rails 4 app deployed to Heroku.

I connect to the DB locally using pgAdmin3, and haven't had any issues.

Now, I want to switch my database to a amazon-redshift instance which has been spun up for me. All I have is a username, password, and the database host name. Where do I store this information within my Rails 4 app so that my app will use this DB instead of the current postgres DB?

Answer 1

Heroku will need to support Redshift as a database option for you, otherwise you'll need to spin up your own stack.

It might be worthwhile checking out AWS EBS service to do this.

Answer 2

I provided a similar answer here, but I would recommend using this adapter to connect:

https://github.com/fiksu/activerecord-redshift-adapter

This certainly works well for any ActiveRecord query you need to do, I'm using insert statements to update redshift tables rather than ActiveRecord create. Working on a full redshift adapter, hopefully to be released in the next few weeks.

Here's the answer I've given in the past with code examples about halfway down:

How can I build a front end for querying a Redshift database (hopefully with Rails)