December 2023 Summaries

This recent launch week for Supabase saw the introduction of several key features, including Fly Postgres, a managed Postgres offering, and Supabase Grafana, an open-source observability suite. The company also stabilized its Python libraries, added support for aggregate functions in PostgREST, and introduced Edge Functions that now natively support Node and NPM modules. Additionally, Supavisor 1.0 was released, providing a cloud-native connection pooler for Postgres, while Leaked Password Protection with Have I Been Pwned was integrated into Supabase Auth to prevent users from using leaked passwords. Branching was also rolled out, allowing developers to create a Postgres database for every Pull Request, and Postgres Read Replicas were introduced to distribute data closer to users and reduce application latency. The company also highlighted several community projects, including Local AI Stack with Yoko from a16z, Finance integrations with OpenBB, and Offline sync with ElectricSQL.

We are launching support for Postgres Read Replicas, a feature that allows you to distribute load across databases, serve data closer to users, provide data redundancy, and run complex queries without affecting your primary database. You can create read replicas in any of our 12 supported regions, with each project supporting up to two replicas. Read replicas continuously replicate data from a primary database, but replication is asynchronous and may result in some delay. We are working on making it easier to launch and manage read replicas, including automatic failover and geo-based load balancing. The feature will be priced like regular databases for compute and storage, with additional costs for WAL transfer between the primary and read replica. Sign-ups for early access of self-serve Read Replica support are now open, with progressive rollout to all paid plans over the next few months.

Supabase has released stable versions for several programming languages including Swift, Kotlin, C#, Python, and added support for mobile using React Native and Expo. The company is consolidating its client libraries onto the same version number (v2) to provide a consistent API across all libraries. Supabase Python v2 is now stable, along with Supabase Swift v2 and Supabase Kotlin v2. Updates have also been made for Typescript support in supabase-js. Flutter v2 has focused on stability and better developer experience, while React Native and Expo support has improved to enable offline-first experiences and other features. The company emphasizes its open-source philosophy, fostering a community of contributors and maintaining client libraries with the community to ensure the company's long-term success.

We're launching Fly Postgres, a managed Postgres offering by Supabase and Fly.io, which launches on Fly's edge computing platform with features such as daily backups, point-in-time recovery, and auto-generated Data APIs, deployed within the Fly infrastructure for faster performance. The service is built on top of Fly machines, with substantial control over an application's lifecycle, and uses a single Docker image to run a Supabase project within a single container. With this launch, Supabase becomes officially multi-cloud, simplifying its transition from using AWS's managed services to offering a more flexible and scalable solution for developers and data-intensive applications.

Supabase has released version 0.2 of its Wrappers, a Postgres extension that enables interaction with third-party data using SQL. The latest release includes new wrappers for Airtable and AWS S3, as well as improvements to Query Pushdown, Remote Subqueries, and Usage Statistics. Query Pushdown optimizes query performance by executing parts of the query directly on the data source, reducing data transfer between the database and application. Remote Subqueries allow the use of prepared data on a remote server, useful for complex queries or sensitive data protection. FDW Usage Statistics provide quantitative metrics to help identify bottlenecks, latency issues, and inefficiencies in data retrieval. Supabase also acknowledges its community contributors who helped develop Wrappers v0.2.

Supabase has introduced four new features for its Auth system: Identity Linking, Session Control, Leaked Password Protection, and Auth Hooks with Postgres functions. Identity Linking allows developers to manually link two separate identities, while Session Control provides more control over user sessions. Leaked Password Protection prevents users from using leaked passwords by integrating the HaveIBeenPwned.org Pwned Passwords API. Lastly, Auth Hooks enable customization of standard Auth features through Postgres functions or webhooks.

PostgREST 12 introduces several major features, including JWT caching, Server Timing Header, support for aggregate functions, and media type handlers. JWT caching significantly improves performance by reducing the time spent decoding tokens on each request. The Server Timing Header provides better visibility into server-side performance by timing various phases of a response. Aggregate functions such as avg, count, max, min, and sum are now supported, allowing for more complex queries. Media type handlers enable custom media types to be handled and override built-in ones, offering flexibility in serving different content types directly from the database.

To celebrate its production readiness, Supavisor 1.0 has been launched with several key features including query load balancing, named prepared statement support, and query cancelation. The tool is built in Elixir and supports high concurrency and rapid I/O, utilizing Rust for efficient SQL parsing via pg_query.rs. It also offers load-balancing capabilities across a Postgres cluster, automatically detecting the primary server and making transparent primary failovers painless. Additionally, Supavisor now supports named prepared statements, allowing clients to access shared query plans, and provides official cancelation of queries with Ctrl+C in psql. The tool has undergone platform updates, including increased client connection limits for smaller projects, and can mediate connections from IPv4 to IPv6 due to an upcoming change by AWS. Supavisor 1.0 is set to hit the platform next week, bringing new pooling configuration changes.

Supabase has rolled out early access to its "Branching" feature, which allows developers to experiment with their Postgres database remotely using a preview branch. This feature is designed for safety and isolation, with each branch having its own set of API keys and passwords. Supabase Branching works seamlessly with Vercel's Preview deployments and provides a dashboard for managing changes to the preview branches. The feature uses Git provider integration, allowing developers to verify schema changes easily on existing seed data. Supabase is currently investigating features such as declarative config, automatic dashboard commits, extended seeding behavior, and copy-on-write systems.

We are excited to announce that Edge Functions now natively supports npm modules and Node built-in APIs, allowing direct import of millions of popular npm modules into your Edge Functions. You can migrate existing Node apps to Supabase Edge Functions with minimal changes, using a demo provided by the company. The addition of npm support was achieved through an open source Deno server called Supabase Edge Runtime, which serializes module graphs into a single file format (eszip) for efficient loading. Regional invocations have also been added, allowing users to specify a region for invocation, and better metrics are now available in the Supabase Dashboard, including CPU time and memory usage. Additionally, Sentry error tracking is now integrated with Edge Functions, making it easier to track errors and exceptions. The company plans to continue iterating on platform stability and custom resource limits in the coming year.

The latest version of Supabase GraphQL, pg_graphql 1.4+, introduces support for Postgres functions, also known as User Defined Functions (UDFs), allowing users to implement custom and complex operations with a simple GraphQL interface. UDFs are reflected in the GraphQL schema and can be used to execute custom SQL logic within GraphQL queries. The feature is based on automatically reflecting parts of the SQL schema, ensuring a coherent GraphQL API from all the information known to the SQL layer. With UDF support, users can create functions that return records, such as searching for accounts based on email domains, and interact with these functions using GraphQL queries. While some features, like overloaded functions and varadic functions, are currently excluded from the API surface area, Supabase plans to implement them in future releases.

Supabase has introduced the Supabase Assistant, an AI sidekick within its dashboard, along with new features aimed at accelerating developers' journey from idea to production. These include Row Level Security Policies made easy with AI, Postgres Roles for changing Studio's Postgres role, User Impersonation for visualizing security policies, Realtime Inspector for inspecting and debugging Realtime requests, and Feature Previews for testing new features. The Supabase Assistant is initially supported in the Row Level Security editor but will be expanded to other areas of the studio soon.

Supabase has recently developed a unique design culture with its team of three designers. The approach emphasizes thinking like an agile developer and making small daily gains while solving large milestones. Design work includes static mockups, interactive prototypes in Figma, code prototypes, wireframe sketches, and sometimes actual building. The focus is on unblocking problems with design work to prevent teams from being paralyzed by how something should work or look. Supabase has also adopted aesthetic and product design principles to maintain a consistent direction across the organization. They use Figma as their primary tool for application UI design and marketing design, maintaining a small design system library. The team includes Design Engineers who can code, allowing rapid shipping of designs. A pipeline exports Figma variables into CSS custom properties, used with TailwindCSS to keep color systems in sync between design files and the development environment.

The Postgres Language Server is being developed to improve the tooling around Postgres programming, making it easier for developers to write SQL in editors like VSCode. The parser is the core of every language server and converts written code into a form that tools can work with. Implementing a parser for Postgres is challenging due to its complex syntax. To overcome this, libpg_query is leveraged to parse SQL code reliably. The lexer breaks the input into individual SQL statements and parses them one by one, allowing errors within each statement to be handled independently.

Supabase Launch Week X is hosting an async hackathon from December 8th to 17th, where participants can win limited edition swag and be featured in the Supabase Hackathon Hall of Fame. The challenge involves building a new open-source project using Supabase within ten days. There are five categories with prizes for best overall project, AI use, fun/easter egg, technical impressiveness, and visual appeal. Submissions should include a demo video if possible, and the winning teams will receive swag kits. The Supabase team will judge entries based on creativity, functionality, aesthetics, technical aspects, and use of Supabase features. Participants must follow rules such as team size limits, open-source requirement, and submission deadline. Resources and community support are available through Supabase's discord server.

Launch Week X is approaching, marking the tenth edition of this event that has redefined the launching playbook for devtools. The Supabase team, now consisting of over 70 members across more than 25 countries, continues to work on improving their platform and shipping new features for almost half a million users. During Launch Week X, multiple things will be launched every day, with tickets available for the chance to win exclusive LWX swag. The event also includes a hackathon where participants can build open-source apps in ten days and potentially join the Supabase Hackathon Hall of Fame. Several updates have been made to the platform, including Resumable Uploads being available for all projects on the Pro Plan, enabling users to upload files as large as 50GB. Automatic CLI login has also been implemented, making it easier and more convenient for users to log in using the browser instead of manually copying API keys from the dashboard. Additionally, an open-source Elixir library called "libcluster_postgres" has been created to allow Elixir servers to discover each other, with Postgres as the common substrate between all nodes in their Realtime service. Other updates include improvements to Edge Functions, Auth features for Pro projects, and enhancements to the Dashboard interface. Supabase's resources have also expanded, covering topics such as using Supabase with React Native, building AI apps, and deploying applications in the real world. The platform has been instrumental in helping companies like Shotgun reduce their database infrastructure costs by 83% while streamlining systems. The Supabase community continues to grow, with various tutorials and articles available on topics such as building chatbots, sending alerts from Supabase, and creating a full-stack product using TypeScript. The team is also hiring for several positions, including Cloud Platform/Site Reliability Engineer, Customer Solution Architect, Data Engineer, Platform Engineer (Postgres team), Revenue Operations Lead, and Technical Product Marketer.

Supabase has been a remote-first company since its launch in 2020, yet emphasizes face-to-face interactions with its community. The company hosted Community Meetups during its previous Launch Week, which were well-received by attendees. For Launch Week X, Supabase is hosting more meetups in various cities and countries, including the US, South Korea, Japan, the UK, Singapore, Kenya, Canada, India, Ireland, Italy, and others, with limited spots available for registration. The meetups are hosted by community members who take on a facilitation role, while Supabase assists with resources and guidance. To streamline the process, the company uses practical guidelines that prioritize action over planning, egoless teamwork, and effective asynchronous communication to bring these events together.

Supabase CLI has introduced an automatic login feature to streamline user experience and improve developer convenience. The new process involves generating a unique URL containing session ID, token name, and public key, which opens in the default browser for authentication. Upon successful login, the Management API generates a new access token encrypted using Elliptic-Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) to ensure security. This eliminates the need for manual token generation and pasting, making it easier for users, especially those creating tutorials or courses.