From the source
Supabase has put OrioleDB, an open-source storage engine for Postgres, into public beta on every plan, chosen when a project is created and billed the same as standard Postgres.
- The engine replaces Postgres's heap storage, which writes a new row version on every update and leaves dead tuples behind for autovacuum to clean up, causing bloat and slower queries on update-heavy tables.
- OrioleDB instead writes previous row versions to an undo log that is reclaimed automatically, so tables usually accumulate no dead tuples for VACUUM to handle.
- It also uses 64-bit transaction IDs that do not wrap around, stores rows inside the primary key index so a key lookup reads one structure instead of two, and writes only to indexes whose columns changed.
- Supabase says the beta ships with OrioleDB beta19 on Postgres 17.11, and that connection strings, Auth, Row Level Security policies and client libraries stay the same.
- In Supabase's DBArena benchmark, when data did not fit in memory OrioleDB had the highest throughput per dollar at every compute size tested, reaching 113,850 transactions per minute on an 8XL instance, about 1.8x more than Supabase Postgres on heap.
- Supabase says the beta is for testing, carries no SLA and is not ready for production, and that OrioleDB cannot be added to an existing project.
