Create a database

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Before you start

• A Raff account and a project to create the database in (the project picker is at the top left).
• For a paid plan on monthly billing, a card. Free databases need no card.
• Optional: a VPC, if your VMs or apps should reach the database privately. You can create one in the same form.

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Steps

1

Open the create page

Go to Databases and click Create database, or click + Create at the top right and choose Managed Database.

2

Identity: engine, name, version

Pick the engine: PostgreSQL (apps, APIs, AI), MySQL (WordPress, Laravel), Valkey (cache, sessions, queues), ClickHouse (analytics, logs) or Kafka (event streams).Give it a Name, for example orders-db. Names are unique within the project. Pick the Version; the newest is preselected. The region is US East.

3

Compute & storage: pick a plan

Pick a row in the plan table: Compute, RAM, NVMe storage, Connections and Price. The Free plan is preselected when your account has no free database yet.On a paid plan you can add storage in 10 GB steps with + ($0.15 per GB per month). Storage can grow later without downtime, but never shrink. See Plans and sizing.

4

Engine options

• PostgreSQL, Turn on now: vector (AI embeddings) is ticked; tick pg_trgm for fuzzy text search. More extensions can be turned on later in Settings.
• Valkey, Cache or queue?: Cache removes the least recently used keys when memory is full; Queue or data (default) never removes keys, and new writes fail when memory is full.

5

Topology

Single node for development and staging, or High availability for production: copies on separate servers with automatic failover. High availability adds 70% to the plan price (140% for MySQL and Kafka) and is not available on the free plan. For MySQL, choose it now: it cannot be added to a MySQL database later. See High availability and replicas.

6

Network

• Use existing VPC or Create new VPC: the database gets a private address inside the VPC, reachable from your VMs and apps on it.
• Skip for now, no VPC: reach the database from the dashboard and, after you turn it on, over its public address.

Public access is turned on after create, in the Access tab. See Turn on public access.

7

Create

Check the Estimated price on the right, then:

Your choice	Button	What happens
Free plan	Create free database	Starts at once, no payment
Paid plan, pay-as-you-go account	Create database	Starts at once, billed by the hour from your balance
Paid plan, monthly account	Continue to checkout	Pay the first month, then it starts

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Verify

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Create it another way

• API: POST /api/v1/databases
• CLI: raff database create
• Terraform: raff_database
• AI assistant: Create a database from chat

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Next steps