August 2023 Summaries

Supabase is updating its billing system to provide an intuitive and industry-aligned approach to billing. The new organization-based billing will replace project-based billing, offering more generous quotas for the Free Plan. This change also lays the groundwork for features like branching, self-serve Team Plan, long-requested project transfers between organizations, and an extra 1GB of egress on the Free Plan. The new billing system will provide a single invoice for all projects within an organization, making it easier to manage subscriptions and payments.

The Supabase Launch Week 8 Hackathon has concluded, celebrating exceptional results from participants. Winners and runners-up in various categories were awarded a limited edition swag kit. Notable projects include "WITAS" for generating stickers with Midjourney, "Stumble" for faster decision making among friends, AI-based tweet generation tool "Tweets," and an interactive browser game called "Doors of Abyss: The Endless Chase." Other projects recognized were "Supafactor," a hackathon entry evaluation method inspired by Rick and Morty; "BeerBet," a sports betting app centered around fun and beers; "Openbin," a Pastebin clone for command line users; "Supalytic," an alternative to Google Analytics; and "Supadraw," an online drawing tool.

Supabase has achieved SOC2 Type 2 and HIPAA compliance, ensuring the security and privacy of users' data. The company underwent a Type 2 audit to verify adherence to SOC2 guidelines annually. For HIPAA compliance, Supabase is now offering a HIPAA add-on for users handling sensitive healthcare data. The transition from SOC2 to HIPAA was smoother due to overlapping controls and streamlined processes. Users interested in building healthcare apps on Supabase can reach out to the team to sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA).

Supabase has developed Supavisor, a scalable, cloud-native Postgres connection pooler that can handle millions of connections. Built with multi-tenancy in mind and developed in Elixir, Supavisor is expected to enable new features for Postgres clusters such as query caching, automatic read-replica load balancing, and query blocking. The platform has been benchmarked under a million concurrent active connections, showing promising results for scalability and performance. Supavisor's impact on query duration was also measured, with median query durations less than 2ms in some tests. The new connection pooler is now rolled out to all Supabase projects across regions.

Supabase has experienced significant growth in recent months, with over 50,000 stars on GitHub and a strong presence on various social media platforms. The community has contributed to this success through various means such as organizing meetups, creating new libraries, and providing support on Discord. Supabase has also partnered with numerous companies for integrations and collaborated with open-source projects like pgvector and PostgREST. Additionally, the platform now supports popular frameworks like Next.js and Nuxt.js, making it easier to integrate with existing applications.

Supabase has launched its Integrations Marketplace, featuring over 60 integrations that allow users to extend the platform with useful tooling. The marketplace includes OAuth2.0 Applications for connecting favorite tools to Supabase projects within minutes. Featured Partners include Cloudflare, Resend, Snaplet, Trigger.dev, Vercel, and Windmill. Instructions are provided in the Build with Supabase documentation for building custom Supabase OAuth applications. The Management API is also available for programmatically spinning up databases or other tasks. Supabase encourages collaboration with open source communities and invites interested parties to become partners.

Vercel has introduced an open-source framework called Next.js that is the most popular frontend framework for Supabase developers. Supabase aims to provide developers with the tools they need to build on their preferred platforms, and as a result, it has doubled down on the Vercel x Supabase experience. The new Supabase x Vercel integration streamlines the process of creating, deploying, and maintaining web applications. Monorepo support allows users to link multiple Vercel projects to a single Supabase project. Automatically managed Supabase config updates each of your Vercel Projects with environment variables, managing secrets and public variables. Starter kits enable developers to create full-stack applications in less than a minute. Database Branching works perfectly with Vercel's Preview Deployments, allowing users to test new features before they are rolled out to everyone. Supabase now fully supports the App Router in Next.js 13, which adds features like React Suspense and Streaming. The company has also created a new template for create-next-app scaffolding Supabase projects with server-side cookie-based Auth, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS.

Supabase Studio 3.0 introduces significant updates, including a new Supabase AI integrated into the SQL Editor, allowing users to generate SQL code with prompts. Other features include Schema Visualizer for visualizing table schemas, Role Management for fine-grained access control, Shared SQL Snippets for team collaboration, Database Migration UI for tracking changes made to databases, and Wrappers UI for querying foreign data sources. These improvements aim to enhance user experience and productivity within the Supabase platform.

The Supabase team has introduced several features to improve Postgres development experience, including a new Postgres Language Server that provides first-class support for PL/pgSQL in code editors, Observability tools for Postgres, easier backups, improved database migrations, test and linting capabilities, database seeding, type generators, an official GitHub Action, local logging and debugging, stable releases, branching and preview environments. These features aim to simplify the experience between the CLI, code editor, and remote Postgres database powering applications.

Since launching its Vector Toolkit a few months ago, Supabase has seen a significant growth in AI applications using OpenAI's text-embedding-ada-002 model for embeddings storage, but this model is not open source and can't be self-hosted. To promote open-source collaboration, Supabase added first-class support for Hugging Face, starting with embeddings, which offers better performance than OpenAI for pgvector use cases. The new Python Vector Client and Edge Functions (Deno/Javascript) support for Hugging Face models enable developers to create adapters that transform input into a new format when upserting and querying, such as chunking large text into smaller chunks or transforming it into embeddings. An example demonstrates how to adapt text input using the ParagraphChunker and TextEmbedding adapter step, creating an embedding from user input and storing it in a database. Supabase Edge Functions now also support running inference workloads in Deno/JavaScript, allowing developers to create API routes that can accept user content, convert it to an embedding, store it in their database, and return the database row as JSON. Additionally, Supabase provides Database Webhooks which can trigger an Edge Function any time a row is inserted, enabling developers to upload plain text to their database and use a background job to convert the text to an embedding. The browser support allows for image search functionality using natural language, while choosing a Hugging Face model involves considering factors such as dimensionality, space requirements, and retrieval speed. Supabase plans to overcome limitations in this initial release by reducing cold starts, handling heavier workloads, and supporting audio and image models in the future.

In recent years, attitudes towards remote work have shifted significantly. Companies are now fighting to bring employees back to the office, but Supabase has maintained its fully remote stance since January 2020. The benefits of remote work include no commute, reduced face-to-face time requirements, increased take-home pay due to not adjusting salaries geographically, and global coverage for round-the-clock support. Additionally, Supabase's remote policy allows them to hire from a larger talent pool and fosters diversity within the team. The company also provides co-working space options and organizes annual off-site events to encourage human connections among employees. Despite concerns about productivity in remote settings, Supabase believes that hiring smart and self-driven individuals is crucial for success, regardless of proximity.

During Supabase's Launch Week 8, a constellation of stars was created where each user signup was represented as a star in the form of an "8" shape. The animation was achieved using React Three Fiber (R3F) and Three.js. R3F abstracted many complexities of Three.js such as cameras and renderers, making it easier to use. The constellation was created by leveraging trigonometry, animation hooks, and GUI playgrounds.

Plushcap here` The use of embeddings in AI applications has become increasingly prevalent, with developers utilizing them for various tasks such as search, retrieval, augmented generation, and clustering. Supabase supports storing embeddings in Postgres using the pgvector extension, which allows for similarity calculations between vectors using inner product, cosine distance, or Euclidean distance measures. However, challenges arise when dealing with large datasets, particularly without indexes, which can lead to performance issues. To address this, pgvector offers indexes such as IVF, which cluster vectors into lists and enable approximate similarity search. Despite these advancements, scaling indexes still poses significant challenges due to the large size of vector data. The Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB) has compared various text embedding models, revealing that smaller dimension sizes can result in faster queries and less RAM usage, while also improving performance. By choosing an appropriate model that balances similarity performance, sequence length, and dimension size, developers can optimize their embeddings for better results.

Launch Week 8 is set to begin next week, featuring daily announcements of new major features and surprise updates. In July, Supabase released an Android Kotlin Library, improved pgvector performance, added new OAuth providers for authentication, and updated Postgres Tooling. They also launched an Egghead course on building a Twitter Clone with Next.js App Router. Community projects include tutorials on creating a simple Dropbox clone, safeguarding data integrity, and using Supabase in various applications. The company was recognized as one of the top 100 cloud infrastructure companies by Redpoint and featured on a billboard in Times Square. Supabase is currently hiring for various positions.

In this tutorial, we will create a file-sharing app using React Native and Supabase Storage. We will set up a new Supabase project, configure authentication and storage, and build the React Native app. The app will allow users to upload files to a backend and access their own folder of files. We will also use Expo AsyncStorage to store the Supabase session and Expo Image Picker to select images from the device. Finally, we will display the uploaded files in an image gallery format.