dbdev VS pgroll

I didn't know about extension repositories like https://database.dev/. What less-known extensions are people here using? I'm curious because there might be extensions that simplify common tasks in ways I'm unaware of.

Before we begin, you'll need to install dbdev and pg_headerkit. dbdev is a PostgreSQL package manager provided by database.dev. It allows publishing libraries and applications for repeatable deployment in PostgreSQL, similar to npm for JavaScript, pip for Python, or cargo for Rust. With dbdev, you can manage and discover SQL packages, making it easier to extend and enhance your PostgreSQL projects.

Supabase just wrapped up their Launch Week 7 with a ton of incredible features. This includes an AI assistant that was added to their premium platform. It is aware of your database design and can help you when creating more complex SQL queries. I'm even more thrilled by their most recent releases of outstanding open source projects, such as the PostgreSQL package manager database.dev. dbdev serves the same purpose for PostgreSQL that npm does for JavaScript. It gives your PostgresSQL database incredibly easy access to packages that give your DB superpowers like full-text search or one-time-only-read data access à la Snapchat. The best thing is that dbdev can load any PostgreSQL instance that has the required fundamental extensions, independent of the Supabase platform. Again, the code is open source. I can't wait to see where this project goes in the future, and I have no doubt that we will soon be able to utilize a lot more fantastic libraries. Like Brandon Roberts puts it:

I thought I recognized xataio - they submitted pgroll a few months back https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37752366 (https://github.com/xataio/pgroll - Apache 2)

At the start of October we released pgroll, an open source tool for zero-downtime, reversible schema migrations for Postgres.

If you have any suggestions or questions, please open an issue in our GitHub repo, reach out to us on Discord or follow us on X / Twitter. We'd love to hear from you and keep you up to date with the latest progress on pgroll.

Any pgroll operations[0] that require a change to an existing column, such as adding a constraint, will create a new copy of the column and backfill it using 'up' SQL defined in the migration and apply the change to that new column.

There are no operations that will modify the data of an existing column in-place, as this would violate the invariant that the old schema must remain usable alongside the new one.

[0] - https://github.com/xataio/pgroll/tree/main/docs#operations-r...

This is a fantastic article! It shows that even simple migrations (like adding or removing a column) can be quite tricky to deploy in concert with the application deployement.

We (at Xata) have tried for a while to come up with a generic schema migration system for PostgreSQL that makes this easier. We ended up using views and temporary columns in such a way that we can provide both the "old" and the "new" schema simultaneously. Up/down triggers convert newly inserted data from old to new and the other way around. This also has the advantage the it can do rollbacks instantly by just dropping the "new" view.

We were just planning to announce this as an open source project this week, but actually it is already public, so if you are curious: https://github.com/xataio/pgroll