Changelog

This week’s changelog – Live from Lisbon!

Our team is in Lisbon this week, wrapping up Q3 and refining our roadmap. It's been a great opportunity to reconnect, welcome new colleagues, meet with customers, and ensure we're delivering on the features and improvements our users are asking for.

As we look ahead as a team, here's a quick look back at some key features we've released over the past few months:

• Inbound Logical Replication: Enables low-downtime migrations to Neon from other providers and between Neon projects. Check out our guides on Replicating Data to Neon and Project-to-Project Replication.
• Organizations: Now available for Early Access users. This long-requested feature allows you to create and manage your organization's projects and teams from a single account. Join our Early Access Program and refer to the Organizations docs for more information.
• Autoscaling GA: Neon's Autoscaling feature is now generally available, automatically adjusting resources as needed. Read the announcement here and explore the Autoscaling docs.
• Autoscaling on Free Plan: Free Plan users can now experience Neon's Autoscaling. Learn more in the Autoscaling Guide.
• A New Business Plan: Offers 500 GiB of storage and 1,000 compute hours, with potential cost savings for customers needing more storage than offered by our Scale plan. Learn more on our Pricing and Plans pages.

We do have a few small updates to share this week, which you can check out below.

A new Business plan with more compute and storage

We're pleased to announce that we've launched a new Business plan that provides higher storage and compute allowances (500 GiB of storage and 1,000 compute hours) in addition to all of Neon's advanced features. This plan offers potential cost savings for customers requiring more than our Scale plan provides.

To learn more about our new plan, please refer to our Pricing page and Plans documentation.

New monitoring graphs for Read Replicas

We added two new charts to the Monitoring page in the Neon Console for monitoring Read Replica replication lag. These charts are visible when selecting a Replica compute from the Compute drop-down menu.

• Replication delay bytes: Measures the total size, in bytes, of the data that has been sent from the primary compute but has not yet been applied on the replica.

  

• Replication delay seconds: Indicates the time delay, in seconds, between the last transaction committed on the primary compute and the application of that transaction on the replica.

  

For more information, see Monitoring dashboard.

A Protected Branches update

New passwords are automatically generated for Postgres roles on branches created from protected branches. You can learn more about this feature here.

Previously, resetting or restoring a child branch (where passwords were previously regenerated) reset the passwords back to those used on the parent branch. Now, when you perform a branch reset or restore operation from a protected branch, the role passwords on the child branch are preserved.

The protected branches feature is available with the Neon Scale or Business plan. To learn more, refer to our Protected Branches guide.

Autoscaling is now GA

In case you missed the announcement earlier this week, we're excited to share that Neon's Autoscaling feature is now generally available. Autoscaling has been a core objective for Neon from the very beginning. With Autoscaling, your database automatically adjusts its compute resources up or down based on demand, including scaling down to zero when not in use. This feature is now ready for production, making it easier than ever to manage workloads efficiently.

If you're not yet familiar with Neon's Autoscaling feature, you can learn more here:

• An introduction to Neon's Autoscaling
• Understanding Neon's Autoscaling algorithm
• Enabling Autoscaling

Autoscaling on the Free Plan

In addition to our Autoscaling GA announcement, we've made Autoscaling available on our Free Plan, where you can automatically scale computes from 0.25 vCPU with 1 GB of RAM up to 2 vCPU with 8 GB of RAM. To learn how, see Enabling Autoscaling.

When you try Autoscaling on the Free Plan, we recommend monitoring your monthly compute hour allowance. A compute that scales up regularly to meet demand will consume your compute hour allowance more quickly.

Postgres version updates

Supported Postgres versions were updated to 14.13, 15.8, and 16.4, respectively.

Upcoming change for branch reset and restore from a protected branch

A few weeks ago, we introduced a new protected branches feature: When you create a child branch from a protected branch, new passwords are automatically generated for the matching Postgres roles on the child branch. This helps prevent the exposure of passwords that could be used to access your protected branch. You can read more about this feature here.

Next week, we'll be making a related change, and we wanted to give you a heads-up in case any updates are needed for your CI scripts or workflows. Coming next week: When you perform a branch reset or restore operation on a child branch, the role passwords on the child branch will be preserved. Currently, resetting or restoring a child branch (where passwords were previously regenerated) resets the passwords back to those used on the parent branch.

The protected branches feature is available with the Neon Scale plan. To learn more, refer to our Protected Branches guide.

Replicating data from Neon for Change Data Capture (CDC) is now GA

Neon is pleased to announce GA support for replicating data from Neon to other data services and platforms for Change Data Capture (CDC). Define Neon as a publisher to stream data to a variety of external destinations, including data warehouses, analytical database services, messaging platforms, event-streaming platforms, and external Postgres databases. This feature is open to all Neon users. To get started, jump into one of our step-by-step logical replication guides.

Replicating data to Neon is now available in Beta

Migrate data to Neon from other Postgres providers by defining Neon as a logical replication subscriber. This feature supports near-zero downtime data migrations, continuous replication setups, and migrating data between Neon projects. Refer to our logical replication migration guides to get started.

As with all of our Beta features, improvements are ongoing. If you have any feedback, we'd love to hear it. Let us know via the Feedback form in the Neon Console or our feedback channel on Discord.

Early Access to Neon Organizations

We're also very happy to announce that Neon Organizations are now available for members of our Early Access Program.

Create a new organization, transfer over your projects, invite your team and get started collaborating. Join now to get a first look at Neon Organizations and other upcoming features before they go live.

See Neon Organizations to learn more.

Console enhancements

We've made several enhancements to the Neon Console to improve your experience and streamline your interaction with our user interface.

• You can now access Neon projects shared with you from the project breadcrumb selector in the Neon Console.
• We added a Created by column to the Branches page in the Neon Console to display the branch creation source. For example, this new column shows if a branch was created in the console or by the Neon Vercel Integration. Additionally, for branches created by the Neon Vercel Integration, a pop-up is displayed when you hover, displaying your GitHub account name, a Vercel Preview link, and a link to the associated branch in your repository.
• The Billing page for Free Plan users now shows a percentage value for branch compute usage.
• We've added a new example to the Neon Console Quickstart showing how to connect to to your Neon database from NestJS. You can access the Quickstart from your Project Dashboard.
• The Primary compute column on the Branches page now shows your configured autoscaling range, replacing the Autoscales badge that was shown previously.

More CLI support for Organizations

For users of Neon's Organizations feature, which is currently in private preview, the Neon CLI projects command now supports an --org-id option, which lets you list or create projects in a specified organization; for example, you can use this command to list all projects belonging to the same organization:

neon projects list --org-id org-xxxx-xxxx
Projects
┌───────────────────────────┬───────────────────────────┬────────────────────┬──────────────────────┐
│ Id                        │ Name                      │ Region Id          │ Created At           │
├───────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────┼────────────────────┼──────────────────────┤
│ bright-moon-12345678      │ dev-backend-api           │ aws-us-east-2      │ 2024-07-26T11:43:37Z │
├───────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────┼────────────────────┼──────────────────────┤
│ silent-forest-87654321    │ test-integration-service  │ aws-eu-central-1   │ 2024-05-30T22:14:49Z │
├───────────────────────────┼───────────────────────────┼────────────────────┼──────────────────────┤
│ crystal-stream-23456789   │ staging-web-app           │ aws-us-east-2      │ 2024-05-17T13:47:35Z │
└───────────────────────────┴───────────────────────────┴────────────────────┴──────────────────────┘

Additionally, the Neon CLI set-context command now supports setting an organization context so you don't have to specify an organization ID when running CLI commands. To learn more about setting a context for the Neon CLI, see Neon CLI commands — set-context.

Postgres extension updates

The following Postgres extensions were updated to a newer version:

If you installed these extensions previously and want to upgrade to the latest version, please refer to Update an extension version for instructions.

New docs navigation

We've revamped the Neon docs sidebar to enhance navigation across our documentation. The new design features a flatter structure, allowing for easier scanning and quicker access to content. Additionally, we've introduced second-level sidebars to accommodate content expansion within various categories.

If you have any feedback regarding this change, we'd love to hear it. Let us know via the Feedback form in the Neon Console or our feedback channel on Discord.

Safer project deletes

We've heard you. Where it might have felt just a little too easy to delete a project — along with its branches, databases, and roles — we've added a bit more friction to the process. You now have to type out the name of your project by hand before you can delete.

Local File Cache (LFC)-aware autoscaling

As we continue to mature our Autoscaling offering, we've rolled out LFC-aware autoscaling to all regions.

One hour of real-time autoscaling from a selection of your databases.

The idea behind this feature is to improve performance by keeping your entire working set (a subset of frequently accessed or recently used data) in memory. We already recommend this in the docs, and we've now made it a native part of how autoscaling works: your compute now dynamically resizes to fit your working set within the LFC.

If you're not familiar with Neon's Local File Cache (LFC), you can learn more about it here: What is the Local File Cache?

GitHub integration

We've opened up a new feature to all users. Our GitHub integration includes a GitHub app that you can use to connect your Neon projects to GitHub repos.

This new integration makes it easy to:

• Automatically create a database branch with each pull request.
• Build GitHub Actions workflows that interact with Neon. To help you get started, we provide a sample workflow that you can customize.

How it works, in a nutshell:

• Install the GitHub App — the integration installs a GitHub app that you'll use to select repositories you want to connect to Neon.
• Set up variables — the integration sets up a Neon API key secret and a Neon project ID variable in the selected GitHub repository.
• Create workflows — you can then use GitHub Actions to integrate database branching with your workflow for preview environments, testing, and more.

To get started, follow the instructions in our GitHub Integration guide.

We'll be expanding on this feature in future releases. If you have requests or feedback about what you'd like to see in the next update, let us know via the Feedback form in the Neon Console or our feedback channel on Discord.

Password protection for protected branches

When you create a child branch from a protected branch, new passwords are generated for the Postgres roles on the child branch.

This behavior is designed to prevent the exposure of passwords that could be used to access your protected branch. For example, if you designate a production branch as protected, the newly generated passwords for Postgres roles on child branches ensure that you're not exposing product branch credentials in your development and test branches.

The protected branches feature is available with the Neon Scale plan. To learn more, refer to our Protected branches guide.

Improvements for our Free Plan users

For our Free Plan users, we've made a couple of updates to make it easier to track and manage plan allowances:

• We added a Data transfer section to the Billing page in the Neon Console so that you can easily monitor all of your plan allowances in one place. Data transfer is the total volume of data transferred out of Neon (also referred to as "egress") during a given billing period. Neon does not charge for data transfer, but there's a 5 GB per month allowance on the Free Plan. For more, see Data transfer.
• We updated the Resources remaining widget on the Project Dashboard. The Compute time since metric has been renamed to Branch compute time. This metric shows the number of compute hours remaining for branch computes in the current billing period. The Free Plan offers an allowance of 5 compute hours per month on branch computes in addition to 24/7 availability on the default branch compute.

Drizzle Studio updates for our Tables page

We've updated the Drizzle Studio version that powers the Tables page in the Neon Console. Among other updates, this new version of Drizzle Studio brings the following improvements:

• Support for materialized views
• Improved filtering behavior (filtering now occurs when you click Apply)
• The ability to paste a value into a cell without double-clicking
• Delete and update support for tables without a primary key. If there is no primary key, a unique constraint is required. A NULL check is performed if a unique constraint is nullable.

Self-serve logical replication

You can now enable logical replication for your Neon project from the Settings > Beta page in the Neon Console. This feature lets you replicate data changes from Neon to external data services and platforms.

Get started with one of our logical replication guides.

This feature is currently in Beta. If you've got requests or feedback, let us know via the Feedback form in the Neon Console or our feedback channel on Discord.

Clearer language around compute types

Words matter. We've changed our naming convention around compute types: from RW compute and RO Replica to a cleaner, more straightforward Primary compute and Read replica.

With Neon's unique architecture, where we separate storage from compute for copy-on-write branching, you can choose the size and features for the compute that powers your branch's database independently from your data.

• Primary compute — When you create a branch in Neon, a primary compute is automatically created alongside it. You can think of your primary compute as the main engine for your branch. It supports read-write operations, though you can modify database permissions using traditional Postgres roles.
• Read replicas — When you’re ready to scale your application, you can direct read-only traffic to one or more read replicas. Unlike traditional systems where data is physically replicated, Neon’s read replicas access the same data source as the primary read-write compute — at no additional storage cost.

For more information, see:

• Manage computes
• Manage database access
• Read replicas

Neon CLI create-app improvements

The Neon CLI create-app command initializes a new Neon project and bootstraps a full-stack application using your preferred package manager. This feature is very new, but it's maturing fast:

• It now supports Prisma as another ORM option for your bootstrapped application.
• It also now creates two separate branches for your app's Neon project: your main branch and a development branch.

To learn more, see Neon CLI commands — create-app.

Select the right compute size with predefined compute configurations

We've updated the Edit compute and Add new compute drawers in the Neon Console to include predefined compute configurations. With recommended min and max autoscaling settings and autosuspend timeout periods, these configurations make it easier to select the right compute size for your needs.

Computes with more vCPU and memory

We've added support for larger computes with more vCPU and memory. If you're a Neon Scale plan user, you can now scale your computes up to 9 vCPU with 36 GB of RAM or 10 vCPU with 40 GB of RAM.

More branch protection

If you've been following along, you know that we recently added safeguards to prevent you from deleting protected branches. This week, we're extended that protection:

• You can no longer delete a Neon project that has protected branches.
• You can no longer delete computes that belong to protected branches.

The protected branches feature is available with the Neon Scale plan.

Hackable AI starter apps

We've published a new set of hackable, pre-built AI starter apps to help you get up and running with Postgres as your vector store. The set includes different types of AI applications, including:

• AI chatbot
• RAG chatbot
• Semantic search
• Hybrid search
• Reverse image search
• Chat with PDF

Clone an app and make it your own.

For more, check out our new Neon AI Starter Kit, where you'll find links to our starter apps, docs, and a collection of AI applications built with Neon.

Consider sharing your AI app on our #showcase channel on Discord. We'd love to see what you're building.

Updates to the Neon CLI

We've added some terrific new features to our CLI:

• Configurable compute sizing with -cu option, including support for autoscaling

  You can now set your compute size when creating a branch using the CLI. For a fixed compute size, use a single number (e.g., --cu 2). For autoscaling, specify a range with a dash (e.g., --cu 0.5-3).

  Example:

  neon branches add-compute main --cu 0.5-3

  Previously, compute size was determined by your default settings in the console. For more about branching via the CLI, see Neon CLI commands — branches.

• Bootstrap new applications with Neon using the create-app command

  You can now scaffold applications using the CLI with the create-app command. Choose your package manager, framework, ORM, and authentication method, and go. Read the docs for details. This exciting new feature is just getting started. More to come!

Added polish to our Branches page

Branching is still a relatively new concept in the database world, and we want to make your experience with it as intuitive as possible. Here are our latest updates to the Branches page:

• Made it easier to create child branches by adding a clear-as-day Create child branch button to the detailed Branches view. It's still an option under the Actions dropdown, but now you've got the can't-miss button too.
• Easier navigation from your listed database on the Roles and databases tab to the Drizzle Studio-based Tables page, where you can explore and modify your data directly. The actions kebab also includes options to delete your database, as well as navigate to the SQL Editor, and we preserve your database selection as you travel.
• We've changed the metric displayed on the Branches page from active hours to the more helpful compute hours metric, giving you a better sense of how much compute resources a given branch is consuming. For more details about consumption metrics, see Usage metrics.

Even more protection

Last week, we introduced protection against accidentally deleting protected branches. This week, we've added more safeguards:

• Resetting Protected Branches: We now prevent you from using Reset from parent on protected branches (often your production branch) unless you unprotect the branch first.

Fixes & improvements

• Fixed a misleading item in our Quickstart, where we told you that your compute had already started while it was still in transition. Trying to connect in that state would fail. Now, when you see your compute has started, it is definitely started. You can grab your connection string and go.

• The Neon CLI ip-allow command's --primary-only option was deprecated and replaced by a --protected-only option. Additionally, in the Neon API, the primary_branch_only option in the Create project and Update project methods was deprecated and replaced by the protected_branches_only option. The deprecated options will be removed in a future release.

  These are follow-up changes associated with the renaming of "primary branches" to "default branches" that we implemented recently and announced in the June 21, 2024 changelog.