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Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative

supabase.io

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Re: Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative

#41

Post by petargyurov »

kiwicopple wrote: post #11
tekknolagi wrote: post #8

Is this a joke about supa hot fire? Since I'm here for it.

Funny story, Supabase was originally a placeholder name - it was a joke so that Ant (co-founder) and I could entertain each other with Nikki Minaj "Super Bass" memes while we were brainstorming. But the name grew on us once we made the initial design. Thankfully Nikki Minaj isn't well-known amongst techies. I hope I haven't just ruined our credibility

That is hilarious, I love it. But hey, maybe it's a sponsorship deal waiting to happen!

Re: Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative

#44

Post by awalias »

awalias wrote: post #42

here's something small I[supabase co-founder] built with supabase as an example: Realtime Collaborative Task Lists https://todo-zeta.now.sh/

here's a list just for fun/chaos: https://todo-zeta.now.sh/?uuid=7e5217bf-7c76-4525-8783-21747...

Re: Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative

#46

Post by InvOfSmallC »

Besides the pricing, the other painful thing about Firebase are the storage rules. Given I understand you want to give maximum control to frontend developers without having a backend, the fact that I need to reimplement them if I switch serverless is an absolute pain. What are your plan regarding this aspect. Where are we going to implement the business logic?

Re: Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative

#47

Post by londons_explore »

kiwicopple wrote: post #39
arcturus17 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuinely curious, what are the hot spots for vendor lock-in? I’m currently building an MVP for a large client and I’m thinking of replacing Firebase for a custom back-end if the project grows. I think with the current size it would be easy but I want to avoid passing the point where it becomes hard to undo.

[Supabase cofounder] Firebase is really only bad if/when you decide to move - usually because of scaling/performance issues. For example, you can only query one document per-second. Once you decide to migrate away, it's very painful - but the truth is all migrations are painful. This is one of the reasons we chose postgres. If you want to migrate away, you can just "take your database" with you. PG can scale with the…

So are you saying there is no way to get a database dump of firebase, so you have to query both your old and new databases (and deal with all the resulting consistency issues) for a transition period unless your service wants downtime?

Re: Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative

#48

Post by sradman »

Interesting. I haven’t seen a log shipping mobile sync solution in quite some time. Sybase SQL Remote did log shipping for SQL Anywhere over email or messaging. This tech predated WiFi, never mind HTTP/JSON.

There is little information about the client side data store other than the fluent Query Builder API. Is it IndexedDB? How does it handle primary key generation? Can the client sync a subset of the DB or do you expect to have a dedicated cloud PostgreSQL instance for every client?

Re: Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative

#49

Post by kiwicopple »

sandGorgon wrote: post #40

if you can add graphql as well, that would be good for you as a business. It gives a migration path for people moving out of firebase and onto things like graphql. you bridge both worlds. quick questions - how are you doing conflict resolution ? CRDT or something.

> if you can add graphql as well

We are strongly considering it, for the reasons you mention. In the meantime though, we do already offer "graph like" fetching: https://supabase.io/docs/library/get#query-foreign-tables (which you can also use over curl).

> how are you doing conflict resolution

Our realtime library listens to the replication functionality of Postgres. Basically its an Elixir server that listens to the logical decoding and converts the byte stream into JSON. You can connect to this via websockets, but we are also building server-side connectors (like sending to a webhook, kafka, log etc). Great for CDC use cases

For the client side conflict resolution - we haven't built conflict resolution into the client libraries yet. It's tough challenge, and we want to make sure we prioritise some of the urgent tasks (auth)

Re: Supabase (YC S20) – An open source Firebase alternative

#50

Post by elitan »

Wow, I thought I created this thread in my sleep. This is exactly what we do at Nhost (https://nhost.io) too.

I usually explains Nhost as Google Firebase, but:

- SQL (PostgreSQL)

- GraphQL (Hasura)

- 100% open source

After being both delighted and frustrated about Firebase I decided that something must be done. The developer experience on Firebase is awesome but the tech and the lock-in effect is super bad.

This was the stack I wanted:

- Hosted service

- SQL database

- GraphQL API

- Subscription (real time)

- Authentication fully integrated with users in the database

- Storage also fully integrated with S3 support.

- 100% open source.

And that's exactly what Nhost provides.

Seeing other services like Superbase, 8base, Firebase (maybe we should change name to Nbase) is super cool. I think we all can help developers at all stages to build better apps faster. Very exciting! Good luck all!

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