Real time updates are a part of almost every modern web and mobile application, with uses in everything from banking apps to news feeds. There are so many ways of handling real times updates that there will always be discussions about which way is better.
A bit of history
For the past 10 years, the most common approach was to use a websocket client, such as socket.io, and server and push events to the customers through it by triggering them inside your backend.
There are also more recently developed data driven solutions, such as RethinkDB. I am a fan of this solution because, from my perspective, changes in the data should initiate events, clients should be subscribed for a specific query and data the clients should be changed accordingly. That what RethinkDB provides: good client libraries, their own query syntax, and scalability. Unfortunately, the RethinkDB project was closed and is now maintained only by the community.
Graphql is another promising, more recent development, but early versions had no subscriptions at all so it remains to be seen how good it will be. GraphQL follows a similar approach to RethinkDB; it uses an effective, independent, and scalable solution where you can request data directly from the client, which is good for replacement of API calls to the backend.
Currently, GraphQL can provide you realtime subscriptions, but the issue remains that GraphQL is a separate database. It’s ok in many circumstances, but it isn’t clear people can do if they use PostgreSQL. Not every company has the resources to initiate migration to GraphQL and, especially if you have a massive product, the large amount of logic on the DB level.
We faced this issue with one of our own projects when we realised that we needed a simple way of implementing real-time updates without giving up PostgreSQL. This is where Hasura came in! I was so excited to find them at Product Hunt because I’d wanted a solution for this problem for around three years.
What is Hasura?
Hasura is a proxy layer between your PostgreSQL database and Graphql server that allows you to set up real time updates very quickly from your PostgreSQL and it's open-source. You get all the benefits of GraphQL without compromising access to your origin database, including client libraries for web and mobile, query syntax, and subscriptions.
Key features of Hasura
Real-time updates from your PostgreSQL database
When I realized how easily this could be set up, it blew my mind.
Dynamic access control & auth
We use Auth0 with our projects; using Hasura, we were able to restrict access to the data while using JWT. Hasura also has a great, simple to use UX for configuring access rules through the UI. Check out this video to see it in action.
As an example, it is possible to have multiple tables that you use from the client part. You can configure it so that a user can only access the data if he is the owner of said data, and define whether that have read, write or delete permissions.
Event triggers on database events
You could subscribe to each create, update, and delete action in your database and call another service by passing that data. A possible use case for that is as a communication channel between your microservices or to call serverless functions.
The release of this feature was great; previously, we had used native PostgreSQL subscription to do this, but it required a lot of code to actually maintain it and there were no central point with a bulletproof solution.
The really exciting thing is that it’s a highly reliable solution. No matter what happens with your Hasura or network connection, the event will be delivered once you bring it back. The same is true if, due to some unforeseen problem, the events changes came to PostgreSQL through API calls to the backend but another part of your application was down.
WS to HTTP fallback
It’s not exactly related to Hasura, but when you use Graphql subscription when your client does not support WebSockets, it automatically uses HTTP as an alternative without any further actions from you.
There are, of course, other features that you might find useful, such as mutation of your data and customer resolvers.
Personal experience
Hasura is a really great product. It’s been a huge time saver for us. It still doesn’t have a stable release and is currently in development, but we already use it in production because all the features we use in our work operate without any problems. Almost every week, there is a new update the developers get closer to v1.0.0.
Migration to a Hasura solution took just two weeks; one week of development by a single developer, and another week for bug fixes and QA. As a result, we got a good, sustainable solution we use for both the web and mobile apps. Our future plans with Hasura include using more event triggers and migration to serverless.
You can immediately play around with Hasura for free through one click deployment to Heroku by following the link on their website If you would like to know more about that solution, I’m happy to write another article explaining how to set it up on existing PostgreSQL and use it with your React/Redux application.
Top comments (12)
Nice to see this!
I've been using the postgres notify method for a while now and setting up triggers all over my tables to output JSON to pub/sub messaging service. It worked really well and blew my mind a little bit to see live website updates without any screen refreshing once I had WS set up. However! as mentioned this was a painful and often manual process. I'll be giving Hasura a test as it would really help to make this painless from your explanation
Yep. Did the same for a long time too, Postgres native notifications very reliable and work amazing, but I always wondered about the better solution, to prevent having extra dependencies and subscription logic in the microservices.
Another product I just came across:
debezium.io/
Streams into Kafka for db updates.
Any tips on how you do that? or code snippets, please?
Fortunately, I found Hasura Package for flutter in pub.dev
gist.github.com/colophonemes/9701b...
Good convo and examples here I followed.
Hasura as a product now comes with all of this too but you may have the case where you don't want to go that route, so these scripts help.
Thanks dear, I found Hasura Package for Flutter Developers
This is super nice!
Alex, in your project you use
React(or any js framework) on frontend?I was thinking in use
Hasurabut not with JS, and onHasurasite there nos no example with another language.We use React/Redux and graphql client to deal with Grapql. So actually you don't need to look at Hasura examples because Hasura runs for you standard Graphql server, so if you want to handle Graphql connection from the frontend and execute queries just use official guide of GraphQL.
I have been looking for a solution to use in our mobile Application developed with flutter and cloud Firestore.
We have pricing issues and our main data is on PostgreSQL which we want to use in our mobile app but no realtime feature. Will try this and see if it can work for me.
This is really great. My issues with RethinkDB is that I’ve never worked on a project with great clarity of DB-layer needs early on, and choosing more exotic DBs ends up being a pain.
I’m sure in other contexts, you have a better idea of what you need early on. But in my cases it has made more sense to start with basic CRUD/polling and then add real-time layer as needed.
So with that in mind I like tools that interface with Postgres or my app’s logic agnostically.
RethinkDB is still cool and probably a better option than when I was playing with it in a less mature state
Unfortunately after the author of RethinkDB stopped maintaining it, not to much changes happen. Used it year ago, and still there were a lot of limitations about queries with real time updates option turned on. So finally I guess GraphQL + Hasura gives that ability of having proper client side access to the data which is stored in a mature database and old fashion database.
Nice, thanks for sharing. Did not know this library.