December 2021 Summaries

Holiday Hackdays winners for 2021 have been announced, with Swappy.one by Zernonia winning the Best Overall Project category and earning a gold tee. Chivel by Lalitcodes and ChapagainAshik was named runner-up in this category. Other notable projects include rtPoll by Emilio Schepis and Federico, e2ee-chat by Arnu5152, Santa Banter by AndyKeogh, Holiday Sweater by Mtwichel, the get list by Glowdexapp, and card creator by Maggie-j-liu, Arash, Eiilla11, and Pranavnt. The winners will receive an extremely limited edition gold medal shirt, while runner-ups will receive a silver version of the same shirt.

The recent Supabase Hackathon received numerous outstanding submissions. Among the winners were Swappy.one by Zernonia for Best Overall Project and rtPoll by Emilio and Federico Schepis for Best Realtime Project. Other notable projects included Chivel, Santa Banter, Holiday Sweater, the get list, and card creator. The hackathon winners will receive limited edition gold or silver tees as prizes. Supabase encourages developers to join their Discord community and utilize their latest resources for inspiration.

In November, Supabase completed its third Launch Week and marked one year since moving from alpha to beta. During this week, several updates were made including the open sourcing of Supabase Studio's Dashboard, acquisition of Logflare, introduction of Realtime Row Level Security, announcement of upcoming GraphQL support, upgrading to PostgreSQL 14, and release of PostgREST 9.0. Additionally, educational resources such as a SaaS course and new integration guides were introduced. The Supabase community also saw growth with Community Day blog, SupaSquad's activities, and various video tutorials.

Today, we are open sourcing pg_graphql, a native PostgreSQL extension that adds GraphQL support to the database server without requiring external services. This extension keeps schema generation, query parsing, and resolvers all contained on your database server. We have also launched Supabase CDN for all projects, which routes assets through a global network of more than 250 cities, resulting in faster load times. Additionally, we are working on improving our Postgrest, Gotrue, and Realtime APIs by enabling SSL termination at the edge. Lastly, we have updated our Functions RFCs to outline various options for implementing Supabase Functions and shared a free egghead.io course where you can learn how to build a SaaS product with Next.js, Supabase, and Stripe.

Holiday Hackdays, a ten-day open-source software celebration inspired by the 12 Pubs of Christmas, has kicked off on December 3rd at 7am PT. Participants are encouraged to use Supabase's row-level security for their Realtime API projects, which can range from building a Santa Tracker to creating secure family chat apps. The event will conclude on Sunday, December 12th, with winners announced throughout the following week. Prizes will be awarded in categories such as most impressive usage of the Realtime API features and most fun/holiday-themed project.

Supabase has open-sourced pg_graphql, a native PostgreSQL extension that adds GraphQL support. The extension keeps schema generation, query parsing, and resolvers all on the database server without requiring external services. Additionally, Supabase CDN is now available for all projects, offering faster asset loading and improved security against DoS attacks and bots. TLS 1.3, HTTP/3, and Brotli enhancements have also been implemented to improve performance. A free egghead.io course on building a SaaS product with Next.js, Supabase, and Stripe is now available. Lastly, the Holiday Hackdays event has begun, encouraging participants to build creative projects using Supabase features.

The "Holiday Hackdays" is a ten-day event starting from December 3rd at 7am PT until Sunday, December 12th, where participants are encouraged to create open-source software projects using Supabase's Realtime API. Participants can build anything they want, as long as it uses Supabase in some capacity. The winners will be announced on Twitter and will receive limited edition swag. The judges will look for creativity, technical impressiveness, use of Supabase features, and overall fun factor. Team size is limited to 1-5 members, and all entries must be open source with a link to the source code required in the entry.

pg_graphql`, a native PostgreSQL extension adding GraphQL support, is now generally available and has undergone significant enhancements since its announcement. The extension keeps schema generation, query parsing, and resolvers all neatly contained on the database server requiring no external services. It reflects an existing PostgreSQL schema into a GraphQL schema with resolvers that are performant, always up-to-date, compliant with best practices, serverless, and open source. The technology was chosen for its SQL-centric approach, which fits well with the Supabase stack's focus on PostgreSQL as the single source of truth for data, configuration, and security. By running in the database, pg_graphql reduces memory requirements by a significant amount, saving resources and making it an attractive option for high-performance applications. The extension benefits from PostgreSQL's built-in solutions, such as caching, error handling, and authorization, and can expose these guarantees through its API. With its public API exposing a single SQL function that returns JSON, pg_graphql enables developers to build GraphQL APIs with ease, offering performance figures of up to 2,205 requests per second on a 4-core machine with 16 GB of memory.

Today, we are open-sourcing pg_graphql, a native PostgreSQL extension that adds GraphQL support to the database server without requiring any external services. This extension inspects an existing PostgreSQL schema and reflects a GraphQL schema with resolvers that are performant, always up-to-date, compliant with best practices, serverless, and open source. The Supabase stack is centered around PostgreSQL as the single source of truth, so pg_graphql was designed to be SQL-centric. It runs in the database and can be exposed over HTTP using existing PostgREST deployments' RPC functionality. This approach reduces memory requirements by 525 TB/hours every month, saving both money and resources. As a native PostgreSQL extension, pg_graphql is written in C and SQL, with each GraphQL query parsed, validated, and transpiled to SQL within the database. It benefits from PostgreSQL's built-in solutions for common challenges like caching, errors, bad data, authorization, and strong ACID guarantees.

Supabase has acquired Logflare, a log ingestion platform that provides developers with superpowers by leveraging logs correctly. The acquisition aims to make debugging a first-class citizen and provide the best database developer experience in the world. Logs are an integral part of the developer workflow, offering superpowers when leveraged correctly. Supabase wants to unify measurement systems across its tech stack, including APIs, Storage, Auth, and CDNs, to give developers a birds-eye view of everything happening within their projects. The platform will also enable analytics and provide granular logs for managing API versioning, predicting growth, and managing billing costs. Logflare is joining Supabase due to its product focus, Elixir-based technology, real-time features, and branding appeal. The acquisition aims to make powerful database features more accessible to developers and expose them to a better experience for end users.

Supabase, a Postgres-first platform, has acquired Logflare, a log ingestion platform. This acquisition aims to enhance the developer experience by making debugging a first-class citizen and providing a unified measurement system for Supabase projects. Logflare's real-time capabilities will also be integrated into Supabase. The company is committed to open source and plans to release an open-source version of Logflare with support for various storage engines in the future.

Realtime Postgres RLS is now available on Supabase, providing security improvements to the Realtime server by broadcasting database changes only to authenticated users while respecting the same PostgreSQL policies used for Row Level Security (RLS). This feature ensures that data access and visibility are controlled according to user permissions. The implementation of WALRUS (Write Ahead Log Realtime Unified Security) enables efficient querying to check access, reducing network latency and I/O bottlenecks while enhancing performance.

Realtime, a server that listens to changes in your PostgreSQL database and broadcasts them to clients through websocket connections, has received security improvements. Database changes will now be broadcasted only to authenticated users, respecting the same PostgreSQL policies used for Row Level Security (RLS). This update is significant as it addresses a key concern of developers who rely on Realtime for receiving and sending database changes in their apps and services. The implementation leverages WALRUS (Write Ahead Log Realtime Unified Security), which exposes a PostgreSQL function that the Realtime server invokes with database changes, ensuring efficient querying to check access and maximizing throughput performance.