October 2022 Summaries

The PostgreSQL community has a structured process for submitting patches and changes to the core code through a mailing list called pgadmin-hackers. This process involves creating a patch, submitting it to the mailing list, and then participating in a month-long activity called Commitfest where contributors and core staff review and discuss the patches. During Commitfest, patches are reviewed by senior experts, and if they pass review, they are committed to the master branch. The process is designed to ensure that changes are thoroughly reviewed, maintained, and improved before being released. To participate in Commitfest, individuals can submit their own patches, which should be well-documented, concise, and relevant to the community's needs. The community emphasizes the importance of collaboration, communication, and constructive feedback throughout the process.

The supabase-flutter SDK has reached its stable version v1, offering improved developer experience through reduced boilerplate code and more intuitive APIs. The new version features enhanced authentication methods, including more descriptive method names and a stream-based `onAuthStateChange` function. Additionally, it provides first-class support for Realtime Multiplayer edition, allowing developers to share real-time data and track client status with low latency. These updates are made possible by the community's massive support, and the team expresses gratitude to contributors who have helped shape this release. The documentation, migration guide, and other resources can be found on the supabase-flutter website.

In the latest Supabase-JS v2 release, significant improvements have been made based on user feedback. The new version includes enhanced TypeScript support with a CLI for generating types directly from databases. Additionally, several pain points highlighted by users have been addressed. A migration guide and updated documentation are also provided. Supabase-JS v2 is the result of contributions from numerous individuals within the community.

Postgres Full Text Search (FTS) offers robust features with decent performance, providing a great chance for Pareto improvement at low complexity cost. FTS can be compared to other search engines like SQLite FTS, TypeSense, MeiliSearch, and OpenSearch. A benchmarking test using Postgres FTS showed promising results, with the database performing close to other solutions in terms of query speed, even without extensive tuning. The test highlighted that while each engine has its strengths, Postgres FTS is likely to be good enough for many use cases, especially when compared to more specialized systems, making it a "complexity-neutral" option.

In September, the focus was on crushing the backlog and outstanding tickets. Three weeks of Kaizen were conducted with each week having a different focus - QA and testing, documentation, and issue backlog and automation. Over 250 issues and 50 Pull Requests were closed during this period. The Auth UI was launched on Product Hunt, an open-source Postgres WASM was released in collaboration with Snaplet, and security updates were made to the Dashboard. Additionally, several product updates were introduced, including a new guide for adding captcha to forms and support for caching. Heroku's Free Plan shutdown prompted the creation of a tool to help migrate projects to Supabase's Free Plan. Community highlights included various tutorials and blog posts on building applications with Supabase.

The developers have open-sourced `postgres-wasm`, a PostgreSQL server that runs inside a browser, allowing for a full suite of features including persisting state to the browser and restoring from pg_dump. The project was developed in collaboration with Snaplet, which provides production-accurate data and preview databases for developers. The demo version has several neat features such as Postgres 14.5, psql, pg_dump, and more. However, running Postgres in the browser isn't suitable for general use-cases due to its size and performance limitations. The project overcomes these challenges by booting only a minimal Linux image and dynamically loading the rest of the VM over HTTPS after initialization. The networking aspect is also solved using Websockets, allowing communication between the virtual machine and the outside world. The developers have created a fork of Websockproxy to provide a reverse proxy for incoming traffic, enabling users to connect to the PostgreSQL instance running inside their browser. The project has potential applications in offline data analysis, testing, and development environments.