Database, quickly

Choose (default: the simplest that survives the demo)

Default pick: Supabase — Postgres plus auth, storage, realtime and pgvector in one project, so a team needs no extra services. Choose Neon + Vercel only when you need just a database.

Rules

• Write the schema as a SQL file (db/schema.sql) and a seed (db/seed.sql or a script) committed to the repo — the DB must be rebuildable in one command.
• Tables: id primary key, created_at, snake_case names, foreign keys for relations, text/timestamptz/jsonb types. Index columns you filter or join on.
• Parameterized queries only — never string-concatenate user input.
• With Supabase: enable Row Level Security on user-data tables, or keep the service key server-side only. Never ship the service-role key to the browser.
• Keep migrations simple: edit schema, reset and reseed during the hackathon.
• Deeper Postgres guidance: github.com/supabase/agent-skills (supabase-postgres-best-practices) — vet before installing.

RAG mini-recipe

Chunk documents (~500 tokens) → embed → store (pgvector or in-memory) → on query embed the question, take top-k by cosine similarity, put chunks in the prompt, return answer + the source chunks.

Done when: a fresh clone + one command creates the schema and seed data, and the app reads and writes it.