Database

Database configuration

Updating the default configuration for your Postgres database.

Postgres provides a set of sensible defaults for you database size. In some cases, these defaults can be updated. We do not recommend changing these defaults unless you know what you're doing.

Timeouts

By default, Supabase limits the maximum statement execution time to 8 seconds for users accessing the API. Additionally, all users are subject to a global limit of 2 minutes. This serves as a backstop against resource exhaustion due to either poorly written queries, or abusive usage. This can be overridden using Custom Postgres configuration.

Changing the default timeout

The timeout values were picked as a reasonable default for the majority of use-cases, but can be modified using the alter role statement:


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-- For API users
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alter role authenticator set statement_timeout = '15s';

You can also update the statement timeout for a session:


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set statement_timeout to 60000; -- 1 minute in milliseconds

Statement optimization

All Supabase projects come with the pg_stat_statements extension installed, which tracks planning and execution statistics for all statements executed against it. These statistics can be used in order to diagnose the performance of your project.

This data can further be used in conjunction with the explain functionality of Postgres to optimize your usage.

Managing timezones

Every Supabase database is set to UTC timezone by default. We strongly recommend keeping it this way, even if your users are in a different location. This is because it makes it much easier to calculate differences between timezones if you adopt the mental model that "everything in my database is in UTC time."

Change timezone


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alter database postgres
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set timezone to 'America/New_York';

Full list of timezones

Get a full list of timezones supported by your database. This will return the following columns:

  • name: Time zone name
  • abbrev: Time zone abbreviation
  • utc_offset: Offset from UTC (positive means east of Greenwich)
  • is_dst: True if currently observing daylight savings

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select name, abbrev, utc_offset, is_dst
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from pg_timezone_names()
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order by name;

Search for a specific timezone

Use ilike (case insensitive search) to find specific timezones.


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select *
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from pg_timezone_names()
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where name ilike '%york%';