The Open Graph #9
Welcome to The Open Graph, a newsletter by Gravatar that’s all about helping you create better user experiences on the internet. You’ll also learn how Gravatar can be the foundation for making your users’ lives better on your application and across the whole web. Read on, and become part of our mission to create a more open, connected, and user-centric internet.
If you’re building with Postgres, you know the pain of juggling database queries and external API calls. Every profile enrichment means another HTTP request, another potential point of failure, another layer of complexity. What if you could query user profiles with the same SQL you use for everything else?
Today, we’re announcing our PostgreSQL Foreign Data Wrapper for Supabase — and it’s about to make your user data workflows much simpler.
What’s a Foreign Data Wrapper (and why should you care)?
Foreign Data Wrappers are Postgres’s superpower for treating external data like native tables. Instead of writing API integration code, you write SQL. Instead of managing HTTP connections, Postgres handles them. Instead of synchronizing data between systems, you query in real time.
Our new Gravatar FDW for Supabase lets you:
- Query Gravatar profiles using standard SQL joins
- Enrich user records without leaving your database
- Eliminate API boilerplate from your application code
- Let Postgres handle all the connection management
Why we built for Supabase
If you’re already using Supabase, you picked it for a reason. It’s Postgres without the BS – no proprietary extensions, no vendor lock-in, just the database you know and love with a developer experience that doesn’t suck.
Supabase has recently gained popularity, in part thanks to AI-powered tools like Lovable, v0, or Bolt.
Building our FDW for Supabase was a no-brainer:
Easy to set up: Docs available right in the Supabase Wrappers catalog. Enable the Gravatar FDW, add your optional API key through Vault, and done.
RLS just works: Your existing Row Level Security policies apply to Gravatar data too. Control who sees enriched profiles using the same patterns you already use.
Scales with you: Supabase handles millions of databases. Whether you’re a side project or a startup hitting scale, the infrastructure is already in place.
Three ways to use it right now
Better onboarding: New user signs up with just an email? Automatically retrieve their display name and avatar from Gravatar. Skip the profile setup forms entirely.
Context for support: Provide your support team with rich user profiles – including location, verified accounts, and professional information – directly within their existing dashboards. No more tab juggling.
Smarter analytics: Join Gravatar data with your metrics to understand who your users actually are, not just what they click on.
Get started in minutes
- Install the Gravatar wrapper from your Supabase dashboard
- Configure your API key
- Start querying gravatar.profiles
We’ve documented everything at github.com/gravatar/gravatar_fdw, including example queries and instructions for AI coding assistants.
Ready to treat user profiles like first-class database citizens?
Don’t take our word for it — here’s an unsolicited post from the CEO of Supabase!
The Open Graph is published monthly by Gravatar. We’re building tools for a more open, connected web.
Gravatar For Developers 