Postgres H3 Extension

[Bugget-Overview]

Hello!

I have been learning about PostGres on Fly recently. I am looking to deploy a Postgres cluster with the H3 extension which needs to be installed on the host machine and then added as an extension since it isn’t one of the usual ones found in the psql extensions. I found this fly community post from 2021. Recent changes to flyctl and the fly control panel seem to indicate that fly is leaning heavily towards recommending managed pgsql. If that is the case should I move forward with the solution outlined in that community answer from 2021 since it is unmanaged?

So far I have tried to ssh into the machines and add the extension but that doesn’t work since they can’t get out of the private network (which is a good thing) and also I worry that the machines are probably ephemeral and this approach wouldn’t last anyways. Ideally it would be great if the H3 extension could be added to the managed image. What path forward would the community recommend at this point? Thanks!

Tom @ Overview

[halfer]

I’d probably just recommend a managed service that supports the extension you need. Could you just use AWS RDS in your closest region?

[Bugget-Overview]

That seems to be the way we have to go. AWS RDS is the only managed solution out there that has H3 installed.

[halfer]

I don’t think it is a bad solution. It’s tested and robust, and for most use-cases I think the latency will be fine. Of course, you could move to Fly if/when they support it in the future.

IMO, the knack is to create a solid data sync system between old/new databases, so that switchover is painless (and of course it is made much easier if you can afford some downtime, as this simplifies the sync).