July 2023 Summaries

Supabase is hosting an async hackathon as part of Launch Week 8, where developers can build new projects using Supabase within a 10-day timeframe. The event starts on Friday, August 4th, and the deadline for submissions is Sunday, August 14th. Participants can work individually or in teams of up to five people, and can submit their projects through a designated form. A panel of judges will evaluate the entries based on creativity, functionality, visual appeal, technical impressiveness, and use of Supabase features. The winners will receive prizes, including limited edition swag and recognition in the Supabase Hall of Fame. The event aims to encourage innovation and collaboration among developers, with resources and support provided by the Supabase team through their Discord server and community channels.

This article provides an in-depth tutorial on implementing authentication using Google sign-in for cross-platform applications developed with Flutter. It also explores the Open ID Connect functionality of Supabase Auth, which allows third-party applications to request users' personal information. The tutorial covers setting up a Flutter project, configuring Google sign-in on Supabase Auth, and creating two screens: LoginScreen and ProfileScreen. The LoginScreen presents a single sign-in button for the user to perform Google sign-in, while the ProfileScreen displays some of the obtained information.

The HNSW index has been incorporated into pgvector v0.5.0, enabling lightning-fast vector searches. The benchmarking tests aimed to reproduce and improve the results of a previous comparison between pgvector and Qdrant. The tests used the ANN Benchmarks methodology, which included helper scripts, runtime experiments, and pre-warming RAM techniques. The results showed that pgvector outperformed Qdrant in terms of accuracy and queries per second (QPS), especially when using more probes. Scaling the database was found to be predictable, with performance improving as the size of the database increased. Increasing lists was also found to improve performance without adding more compute resources. Real data had higher accuracy than random data, and optimizing pgvector performance involved adjusting Postgres config, preferring inner-product distances, pre-warming databases, and benchmarking specific workloads. Going into production required over-provisioning RAM, uploading data, running benchmarks, scaling down compute add-ons, and repeating the process to find optimal values for lists and probes constants. The roadmap includes adding HNSW index, product quantization, and parallel index builds in future versions of pgvector.

PostgREST 11.1 has been released on the Supabase platform, introducing new features and improvements to configuration and querying. Key updates include impersonated role settings, statement timeouts, cost limits, configurable transaction isolation levels, bulk insert JSON with default values, and ANY/ALL filter modifiers. These enhancements aim to improve security and performance of APIs without requiring direct PostgreSQL connections.

This month, Supabase has released several updates including a partnership with Mozilla for AI Help, native mobile authentication support for Google and Apple Sign in, revamped billing experience, added Kakao as a new social provider, and more. Mozilla built an AI chatbot using Supabase Vector and OpenAI to enhance search and discovery on MDN, one of the richest sources of developer documentation on the internet. Supabase CLI has also received numerous updates such as migration viewer, function server for local development, and database monitoring capabilities. Additionally, new features have been added to the billing tooling in Supabase Studio, making it easier to monitor usage, manage subscriptions, and access detailed breakdowns of compute instance specifications. The community highlights include tutorials on using Supabase with Cloudflare Workers, building chatbots with Next.js, LangChain, OpenAI, and Supabase Vector, and more.