Copy-and-Replay vs Branch-at-a-Point: Two Backup Recovery Paths
A side-by-side comparison of copy-and-replay recovery and branch-at-a-point restores, showing why restore time scales with data size in one model and not the other.
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Postgres
301 posts about Postgres. Every summary links to the original.
- 301 posts
- 15 companies
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Postgres explainers
Agent Memory: What Outlives the Run
Agent memory is the knowledge that survives a run, not the working state inside one. This explainer separates the two, then maps the write path, the read path, and the database limits that cap recall.
The Good Stuff
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Angels of Supabase
Supabase announced a 6 million dollar seed round led by Coatue, Mozilla, and Y Combinator, accompanied by over twenty technical angel investors. To guide its mission of providing an open-source alternative to Firebase, the company deliberately assembled a roster of angel backers comprising CTOs, developers, and developer advocates. The post features short interviews with several angel investors who share their career backgrounds, coding habits, and rationale for supporting the platform. Many investors highlighted the appeal of Supabase's developer ergonomics, its open-source foundation, and the advantages of utilizing Postgres directly alongside built-in authentication over proprietary NoSQL alternatives. Supabase also teased its upcoming Launch Week, during which the team plans to release one new feature daily for a week.
Launch week
Following its transition from Alpha to Beta, Supabase scheduled an intensive Launch Week to deliver multiple major features built over a three-month cycle. The event opened with a pricing model designed around predictable metrics like storage to prevent unexpected billing spikes from API requests. The team subsequently launched Supabase Storage, combining a Fastify Node.js API layer with Kong authentication and Postgres Row Level Security for policy evaluation. Additional launches delivered a CLI supporting database migrations and Docker self-hosting, alongside an open-source dashboard UI component library. Finally, Supabase added PgBouncer connection pooling for Postgres instances, previewed an Elixir workflow engine, and transitioned its primary domain to supabase.com.
Developers stay up to date with intheloop.dev
Freelance engineer Kevin Grüneberg created intheloop.dev as an open-source aggregator to help developers track software updates, release notes, changelogs, tweets, and community discussions from a single platform. The initial release provides dedicated coverage for React, Kotlin, and Vite, with plans to introduce user accounts, notifications, and personalized digests. Although Grüneberg previously used Firebase for rapid prototyping, he found relational requirements like count queries, normalization, and foreign keys difficult or impossible to implement. He selected Supabase as the backend to combine fast integration with PostgreSQL capabilities, including SQL queries, constraints, views, and materialized views. This database architecture allows the application to handle structured data relationships efficiently while scaling future feature additions without restructuring core models.
Toad, a link shortener with simple APIs for low-coders
Supabase compiles an overview of customer case studies documenting how organizations deploy its platform across production environments. Multiple companies report infrastructure migrations, including Firecrawl switching from Pinecone to Supabase Vector for PostgreSQL vector embeddings and Mobbin moving 200,000 users from Firebase. Engineering teams document operational gains and cost efficiencies, such as Shotgun achieving an 83% reduction in data infrastructure expenses and Quilia saving 75% in development time using Data API and RLS features. Other organizations highlight infrastructure performance improvements, including Good Tape recording a 60% cost reduction alongside database efficiency gains after migrating to Supabase managed Postgres and Authentication. Teams also report accelerated implementation speeds, with Replenysh delivering OTP functionality in less than 24 hours and Xendit releasing a full solution to production within one week.
Postgres as a CRON Server
Postgres databases can schedule and execute external webhook calls periodically by combining the pg_cron and pgsql-http extensions. When configured, pg_cron schedules recurring tasks using standard cron syntax directly inside the database engine. In conjunction, the pgsql-http extension dispatches HTTP requests such as GET, POST, PATCH, and DELETE to external endpoints within SQL queries. Because pg_cron relies on background workers that start one process per server loop iteration, scheduled jobs do not interfere with core postmaster tasks or external client connections. Administrators can monitor job status, review execution logs, and unschedule active tasks directly through dedicated cron schema tables and helper functions.
Supabase Beta February 2021
Supabase published its February 2021 beta update marking one year of development as an open-source Firebase alternative. The release introduces dashboard interface improvements across the Table view, Auth section, and SQL Editor, which now features autocomplete suggestions for tables and columns. Authentication updates allow user redirection to specific site routes upon invoking signIn and signUp, while a new database management interface lets users configure Postgres replication settings and events for the realtime API. Infrastructure additions include a new deployment region in South Africa and a Docker Compose configuration intended to power local development in the forthcoming CLI. Documentation expanded with resources for GoTrue and Google OAuth, alongside ongoing RFCs covering connection pooling and local workflows.
Cracking PostgreSQL Interview Questions
The guide prepares candidates for PostgreSQL interviews by concentrating on transactional SQL rather than mixing it with analytical topics such as window functions, ranking, and aggregates. It covers relational modeling with foreign keys and join tables, PostgreSQL’s richer types, schemas, indexing strategies, and EXPLAIN ANALYZE for comparing estimated and actual query costs. It also addresses views, automatically updatable views and their limitations, database permissions, roles, PUBLIC grants, row-level security policies, and business logic implemented with PL/pgSQL functions and triggers. The guide recommends thinking in sets with SQL operations such as JOIN and UNION, using common table expressions for readable or recursive queries, and practicing these topics to build a strong foundation for PostgreSQL interview answers.
Roboflow.com choose Supabase to power Paint.wtf leaderboard
Brad Dwyer and Erik Dunteman created Paint.wtf to experiment with OpenAI's CLIP model, allowing users to draw images evaluated against text prompts and scored on a leaderboard. While the team initially considered Firebase, the platform lacked built-in document counting functionality essential for their leaderboard architecture. To avoid implementing custom workarounds or exporting data to external systems, they selected Supabase to leverage PostgreSQL's native counting capabilities. After launching on Hacker News, Reddit, and Product Hunt, the platform experienced viral traffic that peaked at over two drawing submissions per second and surpassed one hundred thousand participating users within twenty-four hours. The PostgreSQL-backed infrastructure maintained reliable performance throughout the surge, delivering accurate and up-to-date score rankings under heavy load.
Supabase Beta January 2021
Supabase released a collection of platform updates during January 2021 covering database tools, authentication integrations, regional availability, and infrastructure performance. Client libraries added support for PostgREST exact, planned, and estimated count queries to eliminate counting friction commonly experienced in platforms like Firebase. Authentication capabilities expanded to include Facebook and Azure login providers, an in-dashboard GoTrue audit trail, a helper function for user emails, and a prebuilt React Auth Widget. The platform also enabled new database hosting regions in London and Sydney while transitioning storage to GP3 for improved throughput. Furthermore, migrating API subdomains to Route53 alongside custom Let's Encrypt certificates yielded read performance benchmark gains of up to twelve percent.
Supabase Beta December 2020
Supabase transitioned to Beta following ten months of development concentrated on performance, security, and reliability. The platform introduced inline table documentation updates, storing descriptions directly as PostgreSQL comments and exposing them through OpenAPI specifications. Developers can now utilize a table view featuring immediate realtime update reflection alongside pagination for handling large datasets. Performance measurements show a 26 percent increase to 1460 requests per second in regions supporting AWS Graviton instances. Furthermore, the update introduces a new region in Sao Paulo, editing support for native Postgres arrays in the grid editor and side panel, and broader compatibility for custom database types.
Monitoro Built a Web Crawler Handling Millions of API Requests
Supabase showcases numerous customer case studies illustrating how companies across various industries utilize its platform to build products, migrate infrastructure, and improve operational metrics. Several organizations report substantial cost and efficiency improvements, such as Shotgun achieving an 83% data infrastructure cost reduction and Good Tape saving 60% after moving to managed Postgres and authentication. In terms of developer velocity, Kayhan Space experienced an 8x boost in speed, while Quilia reduced development time by 75% through Data API and Row Level Security features. Other highlighted migrations include Mobbin moving 200,000 users from Firebase, Bree transitioning from Fauna, and Firecrawl switching from Pinecone to Supabase Vector for PostgreSQL vector embeddings.
TAYFA Built a No-Code Website Builder in Seven Days
Supabase compiles case studies detailing how organizations across industries build applications, scale infrastructure, and migrate databases. Organizations adopt the platform for capabilities including managed Postgres, Authentication, Row Level Security, Data APIs, and Supabase Vector for PostgreSQL vector embeddings. Reported operational outcomes include Shotgun reducing data infrastructure costs by 83 percent, Quilia cutting development time by 75 percent, and Good Tape achieving a 60 percent cost reduction. Several teams completed platform migrations to Supabase, including Mobbin migrating 200,000 users from Firebase, Bree moving from Fauna, and Firecrawl transitioning from Pinecone. Furthermore, organizations like Replenysh implemented one-time passwords within 24 hours, while Xendit shipped a production solution in under one week.
Xendit Built a Counter-Fraud Watchlist for the Fintech Industry
Payment processor Xendit needed a fast, cost-effective counter-fraud watchlist system to screen transactions against international sanctions lists in real time without relying on expensive providers like Worldcheck or Refinitiv. Leveraging their existing familiarity with Postgres, the team loaded parsed sanctions lists from the United Nations and the Indonesian government into Supabase. They implemented full-text search using the Postgres Trigram extension, enabling relevance scoring across queried records. A dedicated database function handles the search queries directly via Xendit's Python clients, allowing the entire solution to reach production in under one week. The deployment has operated reliably in production for nine months without issues, with potential future iterations planned around machine learning techniques.
Supabase Partners With Strive School To Help Teach Open Source
Supabase has partnered with fellow Y Combinator Summer 20 alumni Strive School to teach upcoming software engineers open-source development practices. Strive School operates an eight-month training program in Europe covering full-stack web and artificial intelligence engineering, with students paying tuition only after securing employment. Through this collaboration, Supabase aims to improve relational database instruction using Postgres while producing exclusive educational content for the program. In addition to creating learning materials, Supabase is hiring a Strive School graduate as an intern to integrate new engineering talent into its team. Supabase is also introducing a Student Developer Pack offering two years of free platform credits, Slack community access, founder office hours, and merchandise.
Supabase Alpha November 2020
After nine months of development, Supabase introduced several platform updates as it progressed closer to its beta release. The dashboard now supports manual user creation alongside administrative actions such as deleting users and sending password reset emails or magic links. Database management gained direct browser support through a full Monaco SQL editor and new foreign key controls within the table editor. Platform reliability and security were addressed through a DigitalXRAID audit, default email confirmations on signups, and a dedicated status page tracking uptime and latency. Additional progress included community integration work with Vercel, Stripe, and Redwood, as well as an updated benchmarking suite for realistic server workloads.
Postgres Views
Postgres views serve as query shortcuts that execute underlying SQL statements upon retrieval without generating new tables or persisting duplicate data. By encapsulating complex multi-table joins, standard views provide query consistency across applications, simplify repetitive calls, improve logical schema organization, and enhance security by restricting sensitive columns. In contrast, materialized views physically store query results on disk, dramatically reducing read latency for heavy queries spanning millions of rows. Because materialized views introduce the trade-off of stale data, administrators must periodically run the refresh command based on workload tolerances for use cases like analytics and internal dashboards. Materialized views should not substitute query optimization, as underlying query efficiency remains essential.
Supabase Alpha September 2020
Seven months into development, Supabase announced a series of platform updates across authentication, database tooling, and client libraries. The release introduced OAuth logins supporting Bitbucket, GitHub, GitLab, and Google, alongside table cloning and one-click Postgres extension management. In the SQL editor, users can now save favorite queries and access locally stored query histories directly within the browser. The web dashboard adopted Next.js automatic static optimization for improved responsiveness, while postgrest-js migrated to TypeScript and an isomorphic gotrue-js TypeScript library was built for Netlify GoTrue integration. Supabase is prioritizing a transition from Alpha to Beta by tracking open-source tool performance in a dedicated benchmarks repository.
Using Heroku Postgres From A Fly App
A Fly application can use Heroku Postgres without migrating the application itself, with Heroku hosting an add-on-only app that provides the database. The setup provisions a Hobby Dev Heroku Postgres database, retrieves its URI credentials, and passes DATABASE_URL to the Fly deployment as a secret. A Node REST API using Sequelize parses that URI with pg-connection-string, then supplies the database, user, password, and host while enabling SSL and setting rejectUnauthorized to false for Heroku’s certificate-chain issue. After fly deploy, the app connects externally to Postgres, but the Hobby plan limits it to 20 connections unless upgraded. The article presents Heroku’s US and Europe data-center choices as a way to keep the database relatively close while Fly places the application near users, and warns that credentials rotate periodically without notification.
Migrating Heroku Database Apps To Fly
Migrating a Heroku application to Fly requires attention to database connectivity because Heroku Postgres must be accessed over SSL from outside Heroku. The post uses the DATABASE_URL environment variable, parses it with pg-connection-string, and passes a configured connector to Massive.js, setting sslmode to require and rejectUnauthorized to false to accommodate self-signed certificates in Heroku Postgres’s certificate chain. It also shows a local-development fallback that uses a non-SSL localhost Postgres connection when DATABASE_URL is undefined. With these changes, Turboku can migrate the app and convert DATABASE_URL into a Fly secret, while the application retains its database connection and can use Fly’s region and scaling controls. Database latency still depends on proximity to Heroku’s US or European database regions, so caching within Fly regions may matter for mission-critical performance.
Supabase Hacktoberfest 2020
Supabase announced its participation in Hacktoberfest 2020 by organizing a series of community events and open-source contribution activities. Contributors can attend scheduled live broadcasts, including a GitHub Open Source Friday stream featuring @kiwicopple on Twitch alongside an online introductory meetup hosted on YouTube. To coordinate development, Supabase launched a GitHub project board containing tasks and idea notes, requiring participants to label new issues with the hacktoberfest tag for official challenge qualification. Available engineering efforts span creating framework examples for Blitz.js and Redwood.js as well as writing specialized Postgres templates for diverse use cases. Non-code contribution pathways are also supported, encouraging community members to submit documentation improvements, user experience adjustments, illustrations, custom loading pages, or Lottie animations.
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