Postgres.new: In-browser Postgres with an AI interface

366 points

2 years ago

hey HN, supabase ceo here

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.

We’re working on an update to deploy your databases and serve them from S3 using pg-gateway [5]. We expect to have a read-only deployments ready by the end of the week. You can access them using any postgres-compatible tool (eg: psql).

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

106 comments

- 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.