PostgREST 11.1 is now available on the Supabase platform. Besides the pre-release features, we’ve added configuration and querying improvements. Here is what's new:

Every role that passes PostgREST JWT Authentication is an impersonated role. On the Supabase platform, these are the anon, authenticated and service_role roles.

These roles can now have settings applied with a regular ALTER ROLE .. SET. This is useful, for example, to prevent web users from running expensive queries.

Let’s try it by setting a statement timeout and cost limit.

Statement timeout#

statement_timeout aborts any statement that takes more than the specified amount of time. Let’s set it for the anon, authenticated and service_role roles:

You need to reload PostgREST config cache to apply these changes.

Now, suppose you do an expensive query with the anon role. Like filtering on a big table's unindexed column (this will cause a full table scan):

Then, after 5 seconds, the request will be aborted with the response:

Which is what we wanted. Note that there's already a global statement_timeout set but you can be more fine-grained with this feature. See timeouts for more details.

Statement Cost Limit#

With a statement timeout, expensive queries will still get executed for a length of time. They'll consume resources until they’re terminated.

The pg_plan_filter extension (available on the Supabase platform), brings a statement cost limit. This abort queries at the planning phase, before they get executed.

You can use it like:

Let’s repeat the previous expensive query with the anon role.

Then, immediately, the request will be aborted and the response will be:

Note that tuning is required to get the cost limit right. You should use the plan_filter.statement_cost_limit with care as it can invalidate legitimate queries.

By default, all queries run in a transaction with the default read committed isolation level.

You can now modify this with the default_transaction_isolation setting.

If you want a function to run with repeatable read isolation level:

Or if you want an impersonated role to run its queries with a serializable isolation level:

Note that the default read committed is good enough for almost all use cases. Higher isolation levels incur in overhead as they use more sophisticated locking. They're only needed in special cases.

A long wanted feature was bulk inserting JSON while considering columns' default values.

Having the following sample table.

You can now do it like this:

And the response will be:

As you can see, id and baz took their default values.

As a shortcut to OR filters, you can now use any modifiers on various filters. Take the like filter as an example:

This is equivalent to the following in SQL.

any modifiers are available for the eq,like,ilike,gt,gte,lt,lte,match,imatch filters.

For completeness, the all modifier is also included.

If you only use PostgREST through Supabase client libraries (like supabase-js) then it's safe to upgrade to v11. If you use PostgREST with other HTTP clients (like curl), consider the breaking changes for this version:

• The Range header is now only considered on GET requests and is ignored for any other method. Previously PostgREST responded with an error but RFC 9110 dictates that we should ignore the Range header instead.
• RPC requests no longer consider the Prefer: params=multiple-objects header. This header was already deprecated on v10.1.0.

By making use of Logflare, we detected that out of 20 thousands of projects:

• Only 7 projects used Range for HTTP methods other than GET. In these cases all responses were errors so in fact this breaking change is a fix for those requests.
• None were using Prefer: params=multiple-objects.

So overall the breaking changes are minimal.

There you have it, now you can make your API more secure with role settings and use higher isolation levels without resorting to direct PostgreSQL connections.

PostgREST v11.1 is available for all Supabase projects created after 5 July 2023. Existing projects can upgrade by doing a pause/unpause.

More Postgres resources#

• Storing OpenAI embeddings in Postgres with pgvector
• Choosing a Postgres Primary Key
• SQL or NoSQL? Why not use both (with PostgreSQL)?
• pg_jsonschema: JSON Schema support for Postgres
• Implementing "seen by" functionality with Postgres