Around the middle of 2020
Supabase an open source project released in alpha, it promised
to be an alternative to Google's Firebase. And while the through
line between the two products is similar, for example, they both
provide ways to easily access data. The underlying technology
is different Supabase offers a real time PostgreSQL cloud
database, and it built on top of a whole host of other services.
But what is a real time PostgreSQL cloud database? And
why would you want to use Supabase in a project?Well,
let's tackle the first question. If you haven't had a real time
cloud database, I think about it like the world's friendliest
bank. It's a bank that you love going in, there's really no
lines, there's no inconveniences, it's like you're
the one and only customer. Now let's say you want to open an
account with the bank, you walk up to the branch and give them
some money to open the account with and in return, that bank
gives you a debit card that you can access your funds wherever
you are. But you can only access the money you have. So no
borrowing. You can withdraw money, use the card to pay for
purchases, like food or at the shops. And you can also deposit
cash through an ATM. Both of these actions change the amount
of money you have in your account. And finally, the
world's friendliest bank also offers a service to send you a
message anytime there's a large or a suspicious expense. Now, I
know I probably explained something that you're all very
familiar with. But real time cloud databases work similar to
this, instead of a bank, you have a cloud provider like
Supabase, and you can give your data to that provided through a
CSV import, for example. And Supabase will provide you API's
to access and manipulate that data in your application. Adding
in real time means that you can subscribe to events that happen
in your database. In other words, you're not asking the
database for the newest information, it's telling you.
It's like the bank giving you a message every time there's a
large expense, rather than you having to open up the statement
every month to check what expenses are there. Now that we
have a high level overview of real time cloud database, let's
add in Postgres or PostgreSQL. Now, Supabase is different to
Firebase in the fact that it uses Postgres as its underlying
database technology. And there's so many reasons why you might
choose Postgres, which is a SQL database, versus Firebase, which
is a new SQL database. And yeah, there's, there's pros and cons
of both. And there's trade offs of both. But one of the reasons
that I really like a SQL database is the structure and
the type definitions that I can get inside the database itself.
What does this actually mean? Let's come back to the world's
friendliest bank, they can now store multiple currencies for
you. And they'll do so without complaint and fees, as long as
there's like a handshake agreement. So you tell them what
currencies you want to store, and they'll store it for you.
Now, this is similar to a SQL database where you where you
have to define the structure and the types of the data upfront,
and prevents you from doing something like storing a string
value into an integer column. If you try and do this in Postgres,
it will complain to you. And that's not the case with
Firebase or with a no SQL database. Generally speaking,
with a no SQL database, you have to do all of these type checks
in your application layer. So imagine if the world's
friendliest bank didn't have a handshake to store currencies.
So you can give it some US dollars and declare it as
pounds. And it would just say yes, and take it. Next time you
draw some pounds, it will be US dollars. And that's probably not
what you want. Now, let's talk a little bit more about Supabase
to get things like real time and API's over a Postgres database,
Supabase pulls in other services, like all of these. So
I find it really impressive how they stitch everything together
to create a pretty seamless experience. For example,
Supabase uses Postgres, that's REST, to create a REST API on
top of that Postgres database. So that's kind of building the
API layer. And then Realtime is a Phoenix web app that uses
WebSockets to listen to database events. And yes, Realtime, the
project gives you a real time functionality. What can I say?
programmers are pretty literal. So what can we build with
Supabase? Well, as a small side project, I've built a passphrase
generator app that will take a randomly generated number and
query my Supabase database to retrieve the corresponding word.
So here, I generate aptly spokesman untaxed, and you can
see what the data returns if I use postman, to make calls to my
database. So as you can see a if I call this REST API, I get a
list of words from the word table. So that has a dice roll,
which is an integer, and then a word column, which contains a
set of strings. And then in this URL, I can also pass in a
parameter, dice roll equals this number, and that should return
abdomen. And it does know I'm using Postman to do this. But
Supabase has a JavaScript client that you can use to make the
corresponding calls to your application. If you open up the
API docs in Supabase, I can get code snippets that I can copy
and paste to get up and running fast. Honestly, these API Doc's
are my favourite part about Supabase. Not only do they have
these code snippets, they're also auto generating. So that
means that any changes I make to my database will automatically
get reflected in the docs. Let's try this out. If I have a look
at my documentation, I have a test table that has a Boolean
field name test and just an ID field. So let's go in and modify
this table. So in this table, I'm going to add a new column,
I'm just going to call it like URL. And then we'll make this a
VAR char because you know presumably will take in a URL
string. And then I can save this column and go back to my
documentation. And again, going to test table I can see that URL
actually exists in this documentation, like it
automatically generated for me, which I think is super neat. And
while we are here, let's check out the Supabase dashboard. So I
can pop into SQL, this tab here and I can run some SQL queries
on my database. And then I can also hop over to authentication.
And this is where I would handle any potential user
authentication, I can also create policies. So I have a
word policy or a read only policy on my word table in the
database. And then finally, if I check out just test project,
there's also this option to add storage. And this feature came
in March 2021. It's still in alpha right now. But as you can
see, we have buckets that you can create. And you can store
folders or files in these buckets. So having images bucket
and I can open up some images, and it shows a preview, also
previews GIFs, which is awesome. And then videos, it also
previews video. So bunch of objects that you can store
there. And what I think is kind of cool is in the SQL query, I
can actually run a query on my storage bucket, and actually
return the metadata for all of those images and videos I have
stored on there. And finally, if you're not sure where Supabase
could be used in a project, there's a bunch of examples and
resources in the docs. You see, there's a bunch of Auth
examples, there's a like next js, slack clone, and a bunch of
libraries and guides for you to actually go ahead and use
Supabase. So plenty of stuff to get your hands dirty with it,
definitely give Supabase a try in your next side project. I've
used it in a couple of months, and I really enjoy it. It's also
free on the hobby teir and I love free stuff. But it also
means that the barrier to entry is super low, you just create an
account and get something up and running pretty quickly. And
there also adding new features as well. So Functions is coming
up pretty soon. So that's something similar to like
Netlify functions, where you can run server side code in
Supabase. And that should open up a whole host of other avenues
to explore and functionality that you can lean on. And that's
really all I had for this video. I also, at the start of the
video give a pretty high level overview of a real time
PostgreSQL cloud database. So if there's anything that you want
to dive into, please leave a comment down below. See you in
the next video.
