Supabase is a Database-first product. It comes with one of the most potent SQL servers — PostgreSQL (nicknamed Postgres). Postgres is at the core of all the Supabase features. In this chapter, we discuss how Supabase leverages Postgres and has built functionalities on top of it.
Before we discuss how databases work in Supabase, we provide an overview of the key features of Postgres and relational databases in this lesson. This lesson serves as a gentle introduction to newcomers to Postgres and a quick overview for anyone familiar with Postgres.
Relational Databases
A relational database, such as Postgres, is a popular type of database that uses a structure to recognize relations between stored items of information. It is built on a model where data is organized into one or more tables, each table consisting of well-defined columns (representing attributes of data) and rows of data.
Tables and Relations
A table represents an entity (e.g., a user, a product, etc.), and each row in the table represents a single instance of that entity (e.g., a specific user). Each column in a table represents an attribute (or property) of that entity (e.g., the user's name, email).
