Request For Information: What are you using Supabase for?

[J0]

Hey,

One of the Python Maintainers here. I also happen to be on the Supabase team though I don't work on the Python library. One of the issues we're facing is that it's harder to make a case for the Python library and client library for other server side languages. One reason given is that server side libraries usually have an existing ORM that they can use unlike for client side library such as Flutter, JavaScript, or similar where the benefit obtained by using Postgrest is more obvious.

If you're reading this issue, could we trouble you to share more about what you're using the library for as well as the services you are using (e.g. Storage, Auth etc). Feature requests are also welcome (e.g. direct integration with Django, FastAPI)

We'll share this with the team for feedback.

[feliche93]

I am personally using it in a lot of data heavy scripts that I feel are quite painful to develop in ts/js. Especially if you do some data transformation with pandas, or I guess what's coming more llm kinda flows with langchain.

I love the interactive jupyter notebook approach of coding and developing data scripts, where I can quickly iterate and test any code against supabase, which is just way faster and smoother for me to do in python.

Regarding using traditional ORMs or this library, I really like the familiarity and alignment with the js sdk. It's very easy for me to switch context from js to python back and forth, since both work almost the same. Creating a client, calling insert, delete etc. is so similar that it's just nice and easy to work with. However, I have recently also been considering using pandas or other libraries, since it feels that this one is not used too heavily and some things like upsert or other important functions are not super well documented.

Hope this helps!

@J0 just curious, what other alternative would you use? E.g. is there a way to introspect the db and generate pydantic types from an existing db and use it with let's say sql alchemy. That's something I wanna do more research on!

[turian]

I haven't started using supabase yet, but I have a handful of prototype projects I'd like to use it for.

In particular, I have a Django app (with Django ORM) that involves LLMs and progressive loading as the DB is updated.

I also have a FastAPI app using sqlalchemy, that also involves LLM and a cron process.

Those types of apps would be my main use cases, that I envision for Supabase. All upcoming projects are of these two molds. I use Python because I don't like JS, and because I come from an ML background.

[turian]

One more thing. I want filesystem support that is ergonomic. Because a lot of text blobs are too large to put in the database.

[dishwad]

I recently started a company where we're using LLMs for document analysis. I'm using FastAPI/Python and Supabase on the backend. Front end is Next.js. I was really excited about trying Supabase because I'm a big fan. I was especially excited that you can have auth essentially handled for you.

As I've been implementing some of our first features and CRUD operations using the supabase-py client library I'm starting to second guess myself. In my server-side code I setup these "DAOs" which act as an abstraction layer for calls made with supabase-py. Basically each DAO uses supabase-py select, insert, etc functions. I'm considering just scrapping what I have right now and just using an ORM like SQLAlchemy. Why not just connect to the DB directly rather than going through the extra network call & processing through postgREST that comes along with using supabase-py? It's not clear to me that supabase-py is actually solving any problems for me on the server. 😕

I'm very curious about how other people are thinking about this, specifically using FastAPI and Supabase together. Not sure what I'm gaining by using supabase-py in my stack. Seems like supabase-py would be better suited for the front end frameworks built on Python such as Streamlit or PyScript.

[anand2312]

@dishwad You're right - not a lot of benefits to connecting to the database via postgrest. The one thing you should be getting by using supabsae-py is RLS but ironically enough that isn't working right now either (see #185 )

For anyone else seeing this - If anyone uses supabase realtime on a Python environment, could you also reply here explaining your use-cases, and whether you're working with asyncio or not. Thanks!

[benjamin-kirkbride]

I want to use it to hook the auth into Django, but the lack of docs makes that difficult..

[CareTiger]

@J0 I am building an ai app. Our stack is NuxtJS, FastAPI and we want to use Supabase as a one-stop vendor - for auth, postgres, storage and pg_vector. we would love official support because pinecone is a real good option for us and once we start splitting up into best in class then all pieces are up for grabs (auth, db and storage). Realtime is not so important for us right now. (https://www.sicara.fr/blog-technique/how-to-choose-your-vector-database-in-2023)

[djbutler]

Maybe similar to @benjamin-kirkbride, I want to write my own Flask API for interacting with my Supabase Postgres database. But honestly, rather than using the supabase-py query language, I'd rather just write my own SQL via SQLAlchemy. The only thing I need is, I would like a way to take advantage of Supabase's RLS. It seems like that's not possible at the moment. I'm studying the other Supabase services, and it seems like basically what you need to do is make some "set_config" calls at the beginning of every connection to the db, to set JWT information. Just having some code to generate that SQL for me would be great.

[benjamin-kirkbride]

@djbutler have you seen this: https://supabase.com/docs/guides/auth/row-level-security#testing-policies

This is where I would if I were trying to do what you described. It's not everything, but it gets you a lot of the way there.

[CareTiger]

To add to some of the comments posted today, there are so many examples on YouTube and in github repos for Supabase Edge functions. It would be nice if this library gets a little more love. I would like to see some examples of using Supabase auth with fastapi and handling user sessions and bearer tokens. Also examples of using pg_vector would be very helpful. thanks

[djbutler]

Ah okay that's perfect, thanks @benjamin-kirkbride. So I guess the logic for my Flask endpoints could go something like this:

1. Decode the JWT and verify that it's still valid.
2. Extract the user's email address from the JWT.
3. Send some SQL code to the db that looks like call auth.login_as_user({user_email});
4. Perform my main SQL query.
5. Send SQL code that looks like call auth.logout();.

It's not a way that I've interacted with a SQL db before, but it seems reasonable. Curious how this will interact with transactions - for instance, whether it's better to call login_as_user before or after the transaction has begun.

At any rate, this is the type of functionality I want. Seems quite simple. Just having some docs on the Supabase website to show how to do this would be great.

[CareTiger]

To add to some of the comments posted today, there are so many examples on YouTube and in github repos for Supabase Edge functions. It would be nice if this library gets a little more love. I would like to see some examples of using supabase auth with fastapi and handling user sessions and bearer tokens. Also examples of using pg_vector would be very helpful. thanks

[CareTiger]

@J0 The community seems to have given a lot of constructive feedback but we haven't heard back from you or Supabase. Could you please give us an update? Thank you

[djbutler]

One other general thought: be nice to have more docs on building extra backend services that play nicely with the Supabase ecosystem.

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On Tue, Jul 11, 2023 at 6:40 PM Ven ***@***.***> wrote: @J0 <https://github.com/J0> The community seems to have given a lot of constructive feedback but we haven't heard back from you or Supabase. Could you please give us an update? Thank you — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#424 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AABKG4OTRMQRGMINTUZML3DXPX6AVANCNFSM6AAAAAAXL3QRDE> . You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: ***@***.***>