April 2024 Summaries

The Supabase Open Source Hackathon 2024 has announced its winners, with vdb's vision database SQL project standing out as the best overall entry. This project utilizes Vision API to convert database diagrams into SQL schema, making it easier for developers to work with Supabase. Other notable projects include Complete Components, which uses AI to generate HTML components, and Closet Ai, a virtual closet companion that leverages AI to revolutionize users' wardrobes. The most fun and challenging game among the submissions was NamePLAT, while Retorithoughts stood out for its trivia game and Data Loom impressed with its secure file-sharing platform. Finally, SupaWriter won for its visually pleasing ten-finger typing game, and Echoes of Creation took the prize for its digital experience showcasing artists' creative struggles. The winners will receive prizes including Apple AirPods and Supabase swag kits, while all submissions are available to view on madewithsupabase.com.

Postgres tables store data in the "heap" method by default, with each file split into 8Kb pages. When a row is updated, a new version is written and the old one remains until the transaction is completed. The vacuum process cleans up old versions of rows, freeing space on pages and updating maps to reflect available free space. Autovacuum runs automatically or can be manually run to clean tables and prevent bloat. Parameters such as autovacuum_vacuum_threshold and autovacuum_max_workers control when and how often autovacuum runs, while autovacuum_work_mem affects the time it takes for autovacuum to complete. Long open transactions, stuck locks, insufficient resources, and space not freed on a filesystem level can cause autovacuum problems and bloat.

Supabase introduces SLA Buddy, a robust support tool aimed at efficient Service Level Agreement (SLA) enforcement within its ecosystem. The core function of SLA Buddy revolves around enforcing SLAs effectively through Slack reminders and calendar checks. It actively monitors Slack channels using PostgreSQL functions to ensure timely resolution of user queries. SLA Buddy also employs the Edge Function post_ticket_escalation to post SLA enforcement messages on Slack, fostering seamless interactions between support engineers and the tool itself. The escalation logic is defined in 4 steps of escalation going from a more narrow set of Support Engineers to the Head of Success.

Nix is a purely functional package manager that treats packages like values in functional programming languages, storing them in the Nix store with unique identifiers capturing all dependencies. This enables powerful features such as dependency isolation, deterministic builds, and efficient caching. The author has successfully integrated Nix into their build pipeline for the Supabase Platform, reducing build times from 40 minutes to under 5 minutes, and plans to leverage its power to bring more robust solutions to their community, including slimmer Docker images, reliable upgrades and migrations, local builds, cross-platform builds, and faster component upgrades.

Supabase has introduced several tools in Supabase Studio to enhance security and performance, including Security Advisor for detecting insecure database configurations, Performance Advisor for suggesting database optimizations, and Index Advisor for recommending indexes on slow-running queries. The company has also announced General Availability, signifying its readiness to support all types of customers. Supabase aims to help developers resolve issues quickly while providing insights into the reasons behind them.

Supabase Storage has achieved S3 compatibility, allowing for easier integration with various tools and services. The storage engine is fully open source and supports three interoperable protocols: Standard uploads, Resumable uploads, and S3 uploads. This compatibility enables developers to use the same credentials across multiple APIs, making workloads more portable. Supabase Storage also offers user-scoped credentials with Row Level Security, which allows for secure access to specific buckets. The platform provides seamless integrations with third-party tools such as AWS CLI, rclone, and Cyberduck, as well as support for Data Engineers using popular tools like ClickHouse and DuckDB. Resumable uploads are now generally available, along with additional features like cross-bucket transfers and standardized error codes.

Supabase has announced several new features and updates during its General Availability launch week, including Bootstrap for fast project launches, publicly available Branching integration, Postgres Index Advisor, official Swift support, Security Advisor and Performance Advisor tools, Native AI support in Edge Functions, S3 compatibility in Supabase Storage, anonymous sign-ins, Oriole joining the platform, and more. The company also hosted community meetups in 27 cities worldwide and is hosting a larger meetup in San Francisco in June. Additionally, a 10-day hackathon is still ongoing with prizes for participants.

Supabase Auth now supports anonymous sign-ins, allowing users to create temporary accounts without providing any credentials. This feature can be enabled from the dashboard and is supported by Javascript, Flutter, and Swift SDKs. Anonymous users are authenticated and persisted in the auth.users table, with their status identified by the 'is_anonymous' claim returned in the user's JWT. Restrictions can be applied to anonymous users using Row Level Security policies (RLS). Converting an anonymous user to a permanent user can be done by linking an email or phone identity or an OAuth identity. Supabase Auth is working on automatic clean-up options for inactive anonymous users and plans to release a linter later this month to check RLS policies for potential security risks.

We're making it super easy to run AI models within Supabase Edge Functions. A new built-in API is available within the Edge Runtime to run inference workloads in just a few lines of code, allowing developers to generate embeddings using models like `gte-small`, store and retrieve with pgvector, and use Large Language Models like `llama2` and `mistral`. This release solves technical challenges for developers who want to generate embeddings from their database content, offloading the compute-intensive task to background workers. Embedding generation uses the ONNX runtime under the hood, a cross-platform inferencing library that supports multiple execution providers from CPU to specialized GPUs. The new API is available today for all Edge Functions users in both local, hosted, and self-hosted platforms, with lower costs compared to proprietary LLMs like OpenAI and Claude, which charge per token or provide APIs to generate text embeddings. We're working with Ollama to make Large Language Models possible with Supabase: local development, self-hosted, and on the platform, with experimental support for `Llama` & `Mistral`.

Supabase has officially announced support for its Swift libraries, allowing developers to easily interact with Supabase from applications on Apple's platforms. This release includes new features such as WhatsApp OTP, captcha support, SSO, simplified storage uploads, anonymous sign-ins, and simplified OAuth. With official support, Swift developers can now integrate Supabase services seamlessly, receive direct assistance from the Supabase team, stay updated with continuously updated libraries, and engage with a broader community of Swift developers using Supabase.

Supabase Bootstrap is a tool that enables users to quickly set up a new hosted Supabase project using existing starter templates. It provides a "shadcn"-like experience, allowing users to create a local project and launch a remote database ready for deployment. Users can choose from various starter templates available on GitHub, which include full frontend code following a specific file structure. The process involves creating an account on the Supabase platform if one doesn't already exist. Once the linking is completed, users are prompted to push any template migration files to their new hosted project, setting up the remote database with necessary schemas. Finally, the CLI suggests a start command to launch the application locally using credentials defined in the .env file. Supabase Bootstrap aims to make it easier for developers to get started with Supabase and various web development frameworks.

Supabase is now available on the AWS Marketplace, simplifying procurement for enterprise customers. This announcement coincides with Supabase entering General Availability (GA), allowing large development teams to easily deploy Supabase into their organization. Supabase can be purchased through the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Marketplace, offering a streamlined billing and procurement process. The AWS Marketplace features thousands of third-party software listings, data, and services that run on AWS and are managed from a centralized location.

Supabase Branching is now in open beta, allowing users to enable it on projects with Pro Plan or above. This feature seamlessly integrates Git with the development workflow, creating a remote database instance for each Pull Request opened, ensuring team synchronization and a shared source of truth. The new features include Edge Function support, monorepo support, and persistent branches, which can be used for long-running branch scenarios. Branching provides a number of benefits, including automatic deployment of Edge Functions and configuration settings for custom Supabase directory paths. Early users have provided valuable feedback, driving the development of additional features before the 1.0 release.

The Oriole team is joining Supabase to build a faster storage engine for Postgres, help develop pluggable storage, and work on decoupled storage and compute in Postgres. Oriole acts as a drop-in replacement for the default Postgres storage engine using the Table Access Method APIs and implements features such as reduced IO, scalability, data compression, and bloat reduction. The team aims to be a drop-in replacement for Postgres' default storage engine and supports pluggable storage, with the goal of contributing to the development of decoupled storage and compute in Postgres. Oriole's architecture takes advantage of modern hardware like SSDs and NVRAM, and its experimental support for decoupled storage and compute unlocks performant databases backed by S3 compatible blob storage, allowing for local caching and async syncing with S3. The Oriole team will work with the Supabase community to make Oriole available for any Postgres installation in the future.

The Supabase team is hosting a 10-day open-source hackathon to celebrate their special announcement, starting on April 12th and ending on April 21st. Participants have 10 days to build an open-source project using Supabase in some capacity, with the opportunity to win prizes for various categories such as best overall project, use of AI, most fun, and visually pleasing projects. The hackathon is open to individuals or teams of up to four people, and submissions must be made before the deadline, with extra points awarded for video demos. The Supabase team will judge the winners based on creativity, functions correctness, visual appeal, technical impressiveness, and use of Supabase features, with a focus on fun. Participants can find resources and community support throughout the event, including live building in the Discord server.

Postgres provides a robust and flexible permissions model for users to manage access to their data. The model is based on roles, privileges, and objects, but has subtleties that must be understood by database administrators to create airtight access. Roles can inherit permissions from other roles they are a member of, including the public role, which every other role is implicitly a member of. The public role provides common privileges such as connect, temporary, execute, and usage, but its privileges can be revoked. Superuser roles are all-powerful and bypass privilege checks, and should be used with care. Grant commands only grant privileges on existing objects, and default privileges control the privileges granted to new objects created in the future. Understanding these concepts is crucial for managing and protecting Postgres databases effectively.

Supabase has introduced pg_paper_dump, a groundbreaking service that bridges the digital divide with physical paper, providing a secure, reliable, and timeless solution for data preservation. The service uses Comic Sans to encode data on durable paper, which is then stored in a location of choice or a secure Arctic Vault. Restoration is made simple by decoding the encoded data using Mechanical Turks and inputting it back into the destination database. The service offers security, eco-friendliness, and simplicity of restoration, making it suitable for companies that use fax machines, future SOC 4 compliant companies, and even Vogons.