Supabase Blog

[Firebase founder]

I no longer work at Firebase / Google, but two points:

1. There may be issues with the GCP integrations & UX/DX, but GCP integration is good for many customers and necessary for the future of the business.

One of the common failure modes for the 2011-2014 crop of Backend-as-a-Service offerings was their inability to technically support large customers. The economics of developer tooling are a super-power-law. So, if you hope to pay your employees you'll need to grow with your biggest customers.

Eventually, as they become TheNextBigThing, your biggest customers end up wanting the bells and whistles that only a Big Cloud Platform provide.

This was a part of the reason we chose to join Google, and why the Firebase team really really really pushed hard to integrate with GCP at a project, billing, and product level (philosophy: Firebase exposed the product from the client, GCP from the server) despite all the organizational/political overhead.

2. I'm excited to see the current crop of app platforms emerge. It has been 10 years since we launched (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832877) and there are now some great innovations in the space. I like the way Supabase (https://supabase.com/) has exposed Postgres and InstantDB (https://www.instantdb.com) graphdb+realtime is really promising.

> Not sure if you are new to the internet :)

:-)

> to give you one example of many https://supabase.com/ This is how you can position yourself and be understood by the target user if the product is for them

Supabase headline reads: "Supabase is an open source Firebase alternative for building secure and performant Postgres backends with minimal configuration."

Still don't know what it is, other than I should go to the Firebase website to find out. There I read at the top: "Firebase is an app development platform that helps you build and grow apps and games users love. Backed by Google and trusted by millions of businesses around the world."

And right after there's a "Get Started" button.

Since supabase is just an open source alternative (according to their copy) of Firebase (but is it really? it talks about postgres backends not apps?), I'd rather go with the thought leader in this space. Supabase, if you're reading this: what's your elevator pitch? What makes you the leader for building apps or whatever it is you do? Why would I want to follow you?

supabase dev here...

this was a very fun load test to run. happy to answer any questions.

shoutout to José Valim and the Dashbit team for the help on Supavisor. elixir and erlang are amazing tools.

connection limits, even with pgbouncer, have been a big support burden for us. supavisor should let us be more liberal with connections we allot to folks.

supavisor is rolled out and available for all projects to use today. contact support[0] and we can expose the supavisor connection string in your dashboard. we'll be proactively exposing it to everyone gradually over the next ~1 month. we'll run pgbouncer and supavisor both for you for probably ~5 months before you need to switch to supavisor.

also very excited at the potential features a custom postgres proxy can unlock.

[0] https://supabase.com/dashboard/support/new

1. it's using "semantic" search. so if the embeddings understand that "inline subquery" and "lateral joins" are more closely related than say cross joins or something then that doc segment will get returned.

2. the use cases for this would be you want shorter answers then a collection of document snippets and or you had follow up questions that might not be in the same document. and/or you prefer conversing with a chatobot over reading lots of extra text.

3. you can attach a source column to the embeddings and snippet in the vector database.

Here's an explanation of pgvector using supabase

https://supabase.com/docs/guides/database/extensions/pgvector

it's basically just a special kind of index to use on an embeddings column.

Definitely check out "choose your comfort level"[1].

> PostgREST's limitations also had me going back to an API server architecture because I definitely didn't want to write logic in database functions.

Because of PostgREST's philosophy[2], you're expected to write database functions(not necessarily SQL, since PostgreSQL offers many PLs).

So if you're not comfortable with that, you can treat PostgreSQL just as a data store and pair it up with your favorite ORM. Supabase doesn't force you to use PostgREST.

[1]: https://supabase.com/docs/guides/getting-started/architecture#choose-your-comfort-level

[2]: https://postgrest.org/en/latest/#database-as-single-source-of-truth

Supabase | https://supabase.com/ | Remote

Supabase is the Postgres Development Platform and we are looking for Product Managers and Technical Program managers. You will be working with very strong Product Engineers across a wide variety of products (Postgres, realtime, storage, Queues, etc). If you enjoy working on developer tools and like to get your hands dirty, check out our open product roles

- Product Manager https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/supabase/74542052-f648-48fb-a8fe-a8c5cd14a74e

- Technical Program Manager https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/supabase/b83c7316-77ce-49a8-a199-9f46b1d4d2dd

We are also hiring for other engineering and growth roles - https://supabase.com/careers