Hi,
I'm interested in using Heroku for my project. I'm not interested in paying for it at the moment but the free plan only offers a 5MB database.
Is there any measure I can use to know how many columns/rows of simple text data can be stored in a 5MB database?
Thanks
The formula is relatively simple to figure out, at least in vague terms. Basically, sum the size of each column, and then multiply that result by the number of rows. While this is a small overhead involved, it's probably small enough to be ignored.
A little known Heroku secret is the 5 MB is not a hard limit. You can go over it by quite a lot (by 5-10x) before Heroku will get unhappy with you.
In any case, you would be amazed how far 5 MB can get you, particularly if you are creating the data by hand. For instance, if you are storing blog posts - and let's say 20% is overhead (metadata for each blog post), you would need to write 4,000,000 characters of text before your database hit the 5 MB mark, which is more than the contents of War and Peace.
So it won't be enough if you're storing entire books in your database, but if you're writing your next novel in it, you should be good for quite a while.