Heroku SQLAlchemy database does not exist
Old question, but the answer seems to be that database_exists and create_database have special case code for when the engine URL starts with postgresql, but if the URL starts with just postgres, these functions will fail.  However, SQLAlchemy in general works fine with both variants.
So the solution is to make sure the database URL starts with postgresql:// and not postgres://.
I'm running a python 3.5 worker on heroku.
self.engine = create_engine(os.environ.get("DATABASE_URL"))
My code works on local, passes Travis CI, but gets an error on heroku - OperationalError: (psycopg2.OperationalError) FATAL:  database "easnjeezqhcycd" does not exist. 
easnjeezqhcycd is my user, not database name. As I'm not using flask's sqlalchemy, I haven't found a single person dealing with the same person
I tried destroying my addon database and created standalone postgres db on heroku - same error.
What's different about heroku's URL that SQLAlchemy doesn't accept it? Is there a way to establsih connection using psycopg2 and pass it to SQLAlchemy?