Familiarizing yourself with database extensions

In the very first chapter of the book, I mentioned that the database (Postgres) within Supabase allows you to add extensions to become even more powerful. Such extensions are modular, self-contained units, which makes it easy to install and uninstall them. Each has its custom functionality built in and can expose functions in the schema they’re installed; some, such as pg_cron, will also come with their own data structures (for example, tables). In this chapter, we will get to know a few such extensions, but for now, let’s see how you can manage extensions generally.

Installing an extension in the default extensions schema

On the hosted instance on supabase.com, you can go to Database | Extensions to view a collection of available extensions, and enable or disable them by simply clicking the respective toggle button:

Figure 13.2: Database extensions

This also works the same way locally...