Glossary
Supabase & Postgres glossary
Short, precise definitions of the terms that come up when you own a Postgres database — cross-linked to the guides and errors where they matter.
- anon key
- The public Supabase API key you embed in browser and mobile clients; every request it makes is still filtered by the Row Level Security policies on your tables.
- Connection pooler (Supavisor)
- A connection pooler multiplexes many client connections onto a few Postgres connections. Supabase's pooler, Supavisor, also provides an IPv4-reachable host for the database.
- Edge Function
- A Supabase Edge Function is a Deno serverless function with a ~150s execution cap and IPv4-only egress, which shapes how it reaches a Postgres database.
- foreign key
- A foreign key is a Postgres constraint that forces a column value to match a row in a referenced table, enforcing referential integrity between them.
- JWT
- A JWT is a signed JSON Web Token that carries auth claims (user id and role); Supabase Auth issues it and RLS policies read it to authorize row access.
- migration file
- A timestamped .sql file in supabase/migrations that records one schema change and acts as the versioned source of truth for your Postgres schema.
- pg_dump
- pg_dump is PostgreSQL's native command-line tool that produces a logical backup of a database — its schema, data, or both — as a SQL script or archive file.
- Row Level Security (RLS)
- Row Level Security (RLS) is a Postgres feature that filters which rows each user can read or write, enforced by the database itself rather than your application code.
- schema replay
- Schema replay recreates a source Postgres schema on a destination by re-running migration files and reconstructing ad-hoc objects through introspection.
- search_path
- The search_path is the ordered list of schemas Postgres scans to resolve an unqualified table, type, or function name in a query.
- sequence resync
- Sequence resync sets a table's Postgres sequence to the maximum existing id after an import, so the next auto-generated id does not collide with a row you inserted.
- service_role key
- The service_role key is a Supabase API key that bypasses Row Level Security to read and write every row — server-side only, never shipped to a browser.