Heroku PostgresSQL 9.3 public beta is now available, introducing a plethora of useful features. The new built-in Postgres FDWs(Foreign data wrappers- which allow you to query from within Postgres to an external datasource) available to all Heroku Postgres 9.3 users, the API for foreign data wrappers now supports them writing as well as reading data. This lays the groundwork for more powerful wrappers to be built which in the future will enable Postgres to be a fully federated database.Dedicated JSON operators have been introduced and the number of functions expanded to 12, including JSON parsing support.VIEW Features Materialized Views (Conceptually they are similar to “CREATE TABLE AS”, but store the view definition so it can be easily refreshed), Recursive View Syntax (provides a shorthand way of formulating a recursive common table expression (CTE)), and Updatable Views.PostgreSQL’s built-in binary replication has been improved in four ways: streaming-only remastering, fast failover, and architecture-independent streaming, and pg_basebackup conf setup. There are over 1700 of less prominent additions and fixes over 1700 commits since 9.3 development started. As Postgres moves from 9.3 beta releases to a 9.3.0 GA release, support for this version upgrades from alpha to beta.https://postgres.heroku.com/blog/past/2013/9/9/postgres_93_now_available/