Postgres.new
postgres.new
postgres.new
Not even basic line on what this service is supposed to do? Only able to infer that this provides some on the fly Postgres instance based on DNS name
here is a video, if you're on mobile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooWaPVvljlU
and a blog post with more details: https://supabase.com/blog/postgres-new
We originally linked[0] to the blog post but it looks like this one overtook us on HN
I want to try this, but, likewise, "to prevent abuse of my Github I ask for some idea what the service does before signing in"
LOL, Next!
Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooWaPVvljlU
What the team at Supabase have built with postgres.new is incredible, it has been a lot of fun to work with them last month or so to have PGlite incorporate the things they needed. It's fed directly back into the development, helped us iron out some bugs and finish hitting the feature list required. They are the most genuinely nice team to work with.
SQL databases and LLMs go together so incredible well, the structured data and schema enables an LLM to infer so much context about the database and the underlying data. This exploration into a UI over this pairing is going to be incredibly influential, it opens up what has traditionally been a complex technical problem (designing database schemas) to everyone. That's the true power of LLMs.
I'm not going to go on about PGlite here as postgres.new really deserves the limelight!
This is a new service that we're experimenting with that uses PGLite[0], a WASM build of Postgres that runs in the browser. You might remember an earlier WASM build[1] that was around ~30MB. The Electric team [2] have gone one step further and created a complete build of Postgres that’s under 3MB.
Their implementation is technically interesting. Postgres is normally multi-process - each client connection is handed to a child process by the postmaster process. In WASM there’s limited/no support for process forking and threads. Fortunately, Postgres has a relatively unknown built-in “single user mode” [3] primarily designed for bootstrapping a new database and disaster recovery. Single-user mode only supports a minimal cancel REPL, so PGlite adds wire-protocol support which enables parametrised queries etc.
We have created https://postgres.new as an experiment. You can think of it like a love-child between Postgres and ChatGPT: in-browser Postgres sandbox with AI assistance. You can spin up as many new Postgres databases as you want because they all live inside your browser. We pair PGlite with an LLM (currently GPT-4o) and give it full reign over the database with unrestricted permissions. This is an important detail - giving an LLM full autonomy means that it can run multiple operations back-to-back: any SQL errors from Postgres are fed back to the language model so that it can have a few more attempts to solve the problem. Since it’s in-browser it’s low risk.
Some other features include:
- CSV upload: you can upload a CSV and it will automatically create a Postgres table which you can query with natural language.
- Charts: you can ask the LLM to create a chart with the data and change the colors of the charts.
- RAG / pgvector: PGLite supports pgvector, so you can ask the LLM to create embeddings for RAG. The site uses transformers.js [4] to create embeddings inside the browser.
Everything is open source. A huge shout-out to the Electric team who have been a pleasure to build with.
[0] PGLite: https://github.com/electric-sql/pglite
[1] Postgres-wasm: https://supabase.com/blog/postgres-wasm
[2] Electric: https://electric-sql.com/
[3] Single user mode: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/app-postgres.html#AP...
[4] transformers.js: https://github.com/xenova/transformers.js
[5] pg-gateway: https://github.com/supabase-community/pg-gateway