How to Upgrade from a Shared Plan to a Dedicated Plan in Elephant SQL

Products

• Services Suite

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:
It is not possible to directly upgrade from a shared plan to a dedicated plan when using ElephantSQL through the PWS Marketplace.

Environment

Resolution

To make the transition, you need to migrate from one plan to the next. The following instructions show how to make this migration.

1. Create a new service instance with a dedicated plan.
2. Stop the app or app instances and unbind the shared plan service.
3. Do a pg_dump from the old to the new one

   pg_dump postgres://user:pass@host/db | psql postgres://user:pass@host2/newdb

   That will pipe the data from the old instance to the new one. You'll want to do this from a location that has good bandwidth so that data transfers quickly.
4. Bind the app to the new dedicated service and start the app.

This type of upgrade will imply some downtime since it requires the app to be stopped. This is so that no new data is written in the old DB while and after passing the data to the new one.