postgres-websockets VS postgrest

At work, we've finally replaced a large part of a custom (mostly-)web backend with PostgREST recently, and that's quite a relief: considerably less code to maintain in that project now, and that was a rather awkward code. Something akin to PostgREST's "Embedding with Top-level Filtering" [1] had to be provided for all the tables, with OpenAPI schema and a typed API (Haskell + Servant); I avoided manually writing it all down, but at the cost of poking framework internals, and maintainability suffered. It was particularly annoying that the code doesn't really do anything useful, except for standing between a database and an HTTP client, and simply mimics the database anyway. Whenever a change had to be introduced, it was introduced into the database, the backend, and the frontend simultaneously, so it wasn't even useful for some kind of compatibility.

Now PostgREST handles all that, and only a few less trivial endpoints are handled by a custom backend (including streaming, which I'm considering replacing with postgrest-websocket [2] at some point).

During the switch to PostgREST, the encountered minor issues were those with inherited tables (had to set a bunch of computed/virtual columns [3] in order to "embed" those), and with a bug on filtering using such relations (turned out it was an already-fixed regression [4], so an update helped). Also a couple of helper stored procedures (to use via /rpc/) for updates in multiple tables at once (many-to-many relationships, to edit entities along with their relationships, using fewer requests) were added (though the old custom backend didn't have that), the security policies were set from the beginning, the frontend was rewritten (which allowed to finally switch without adding more work), so it was only left to cleanup the backend.

Not using views, since as mentioned above, database changes usually correspond to frontend changes, and the API doesn't have to be that stable yet.

Happy with it so far.

[1] https://postgrest.org/en/stable/api.html#embedding-with-top-...

[2] https://github.com/diogob/postgres-websockets

[3] https://postgrest.org/en/stable/api.html#computed-virtual-co...

[4] https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest/issues/2530

hey hn, supabase ceo her

we just announced GA, after ~4 years of beta. for those who don't know: supabase is a postgres hosting company. we also host other open source "backend" tools that make it easy to get started with postgres (tools like PostgREST for auto-generate APIs [0])

we owe a lot to the HN community. you launched us 4 years ago [1], when we were just a few developers. since then HN has been a staple in our journey, one of the best sources of product feedback [2]

the GA badge is mostly to signify organizational readiness. we're at a stage where we can take any profile of customer. we have a support team that works 24/7, and a success team that will help customers improve their postgres usage. we released our Index Advisor [3] yesterday, and we'll be releasing a few more products this week that helps customer with performance and security.

on a personal note: i read HN most days, and love going through the ShowHN's to see what devs are building. thanks for being an awesome community and my favorite place to lurk on the internet. i'll stick around to answer any questions

[0] PostgREST: https://postgrest.org

[1] Launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23319901

[2] HN journey: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

[3] Index Advisor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40028111

If you use PostgreSQL and are proficient with using its row-level security feature, you can choose from several tools/services built above RLS, including Supabase, PostgREST, and PostGraphile. They all provide a way to expose database CRUD as a web API, assuming you've configured the RLS rules to properly secure the access.

wget 'https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest/releases/download/v11.2.0/postgrest-v11.2.0-linux-static-x64.tar.xz'

SupaBase is entirely based upon PostgREST. In fact, PostgREST is arguably 49% of their value proposition according to their own website. The other 49% is PostgreSQL. PostgreSQL of course is a super mature database, and some would argue the best RDBMS on the planet, so let's ignore that part for a moment, and consider it a mature thing and move on to PostgREST.

You don't need this PHP snippet:

To get the same functionality without the extra step, simply use PostgREST [1]

[1] https://postgrest.org/

PostgREST is a standalone web server that turns your PostgreSQL database into a RESTful API using the database's structural constraints and permissions to define the API's endpoints and operations. In this tutorial, you will create a simple note-taking app by leveraging PostgREST to construct a RESTful API for the app and using htmx to deliver HTML content.

You might find some info in the docs of PostgREST [1] or in the previous discussions on HN about it [2].

For the versioning, I just have a git repo where I keep every role, schema, table, view, function, trigger, etc. definitions. Every time I change something in the database I first change it in the git repo too to have an history.

[1] https://postgrest.org

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=postgrest

Don't know if you would call this a "program" but PostgREST is written is Haskell too.

https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest