Under the hood we use PostgREST. At the same time, we may (also) offer GraphQL using Postgraphile, so people can bring their own client-library.
Differences from Hasura:
- Auth: we will use Postgres RLS
- Realtime: we don't use triggers, we use WAL (much more scalable)
- Only Postgres: Hasura mentioned they will build for other RDBMS. We're all in on PG and some of the more advanced features (replication, High Availability)
- UI/UX. We will build an interface like Airtable, so that even your non-techie friends can use it
Two of your points are future feature promises. One of them is how Hasura plans to support other DB's besides Postgres, which they've already been exclusively working on & supporting for multiple years at this point.
Another mentions that you have plans to build a UI for non-technical people. This isn't different either, Hasura already has this too.
The triggers part is also downright wrong. Check the technical document on scaling to 1,000,000 live queries.
Discussions about the scalability and tradeoffs of WAL, Triggers, and the decided implementation (interval-based polling) are given:
"We experimented with several methods of capturing events from the underlying Postgres database to decide when to refetch queries."
"Listen/Notify: Requires instrumenting all tables with triggers, events consumed by consumer (the web-server) might be dropped in case of the consumer restarting or a network disruption."
"WAL: Reliable stream, but LR slots are expensive which makes horizontal scaling hard, and are often not available on managed database vendors. Heavy write loads can pollute the WAL and will need throttling at the application layer."
"After these experiments, we’ve currently fallen back to interval based polling to refetch queries. So instead of refetching when there is an appropriate event, we refetch the query based on a time interval. There were two major reasons for doing this:..."
You're 100% correct about their triggers and thanks for the link. I actually hadn't read it but I did today after waking up and it's quite fascinating.
Hasura is a great product and it deserves all the love it gets here. Tanmai and exchanged a few messages in February, so we're aware of what eachother are working on. I don't really feel this space is a player-takes-all market (see also nhost, graphile, subzero, amplify - all great products).
The parent comment "how is it going to compare" so I listed a couple of promises. It's up to us now to deliver on those promises - we're only a small team and our startup is 5 months old, but we move fast. I don't plan to disappoint. Sorry this reply took a few hours, I wanted to make sure I read your link (and slept) before commenting.
This might be pedantic of me, but conflating RLS and auth isn't
a great look. RLS is a general purpose mechanism for constraining row operations, and auth has to do with usernames and passwords and session tokens.
We are still doing a heavy assessment of whether this model can be generalised for everyone. It covers the details of both authentication and authorization - we are just building a nice/easy way to enable this for everyone (probably using the same model as Postgraphile: https://www.graphile.org/postgraphile/security/)
Probably similar in an overall sense to Postgraphile et al[0], in case you haven't seen that - although I am also interested in the specifics relating to Supabase.
