I have always been a fan of PostgreSQL . I picked it for megabus.com and used it when the system grew from a few hundred orders a day to tens of thousands each day.

Back in the late noughties, when MySQL was getting popular, people would often ask me why I was picking Postgres. MySQL was so popular and so fast and it had cool things like query caching (with postgres did not have). My answer was simple - postgresql was a “real database system.” I remember being shocked when I trying to use transactions and it just ignored it. Postgresql was also really good at failing gracefully under high load while MySQL had a bad habit of just stopping processing any requests and becoming unresponsive.

This was more than 15 years ago now so things may have changed with MySQL, though its acquisition by Oracle was certainly a bad sign.

Years on, and it would seem that people are better informed as to the benefits of postgresql.

I am currently working on a small game-like social experiment app and it requires persistent storage. I was intially considering firebase but the costs put me off. In the world of cloud, I didn’t think that spinning up a postgresql server was really an option - or is it?

Supabase

I ran into Supabase as a more cost-effective option and as a bonus it’s open source and based on PostgreSQL. I’ll admit that I was skeptical that it would embody the postgresql philosophy that I knew and loved. I expected another capitalistic effort at monetising open source.

I was pleasantly surprised. I am in the very early stages of using it, but so far, I love it. Not a huge fan its love of javascript, but the whole world seems to be a big fan (I am not - but then I wasn’t a fan of MySQL either ;))

I didn’t end up going further with it, but the early impression was good enough that I’d reach for it again.