How to connect and sync Supabase to PostgreSQL in 5 minutes with Whalesync

Connecting Supabase to PostgreSQL sounds weird on the surface, but it can make sense in very specific circumstances. For example, say you’re a product marketer or operations lead. Your engineering team owns and maintains a production PostgreSQL database, but you don’t have access to it. You want to analyze and explore user data, or build lightweight internal tools.

Rather than constantly asking engineers to pull data or exporting CSVs, you spin up your own Supabase instance and set up a one-way sync from PostgreSQL. This lets you siphon off real production data into a workspace you control, where you can run analytics, test ideas, and build without ever touching the production database directly.

You can do this in five minutes. Here’s how:

Why should you connect Supabase to PostgreSQL?

Your production database is off-limits, but you need access to real data without constantly asking engineers to pull it.

 Syncing PostgreSQL to Supabase gives you a sandbox environment where you can explore, analyze data without constantly asking engineers to pull the data for you.

When should you connect Supabase and PostgreSQL?

• You need safe, read-only access to production data: Syncing from PostgreSQL to Supabase gives you access to real user or product data. 
• You’re running experiments as a marketer, ops lead, or analyst: Instead of relying on engineering for data pulls, you can explore real user behavior, test hypotheses, or build dashboards independently.

How to sync Supabase and PostgreSQL

Here’s a step by step guide to sync Supabase and PostgreSQL.

Step 1: Create a new sync

Log in to your Whalesync account and click ‘New sync’

Step 2: Authorize your apps

Select the apps you want to connect. In this case, it’s Supabase and PostgreSQL. Then, authorize these two apps. Authorizing the apps enables Whalesync to have access to your app data in order to complete the syncs.

When you’re authorizing the apps, you need to select the PostgreSQL schema you want the data to be synced from and the Supabase organization workspace where the data should sync to.

To authorize PostgreSQL, you need to paste your connection string and set your parameters.

Step 3: Map your tables

Choose the tables that you want to sync from PostgreSQL to Supabase. You can add multiple table mappings to a sync and related fields. You can also create the tables you want to map from Whalesync’s user interface, making it much faster to get started with your syncing.

Step 4: Map your fields

You can choose how many fields you want to map, whether you want to map all of the fields or just a few.

You can also create fields here.

 Whalesync will match the records according to the fields you mapped.

When new data is added to your PostgreSQL schema, the data will automatically sync to Supabase.

Step 5: Activate sync

The final step is to activate your sync! Before you activate your sync, you’ll see a preview that shows you how many records will be added to each tool.

Done! Supabase and PostgreSQL is synced 🤝

Now you have access to your organization’s production data.

Start syncing today

Ready to connect PostgreSQL and Supabase? Get syncing today