Nile Blog
thenile.dev · Company blog · on HN since 2022
Nile, a company building serverless Postgres for multi-tenant SaaS, writes about Postgres features, row-level security, and tenant isolation.
What HN saysHN mentions it mainly as a Postgres option for isolating tenants, often alongside Neon; its CEO also appears in the comments.
27HN people shared it
8linked it in comments
90stories submitted
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What HN people wrote when they linked it
omneity · 2025-05-06
Serverless in the context of Postgres means to decouple storage and compute, so you could scale compute "infinitely" without setting up replica servers. This is what Neon offers, where you can just keep hitting their endpoints with your pg client and it should just take whatever load (in principle) and bill you per request.
Supabase gives you a server that runs classic Postgres in a process. Scaling in this scenario means you increase your server's capacity, with a potential downtime while the upgrade is happening.
You are confusing _managed_ Postgres for _serverless_.
Others in the serverless Postgres space:
- https://www.orioledb.com/ (pg extension)
- https://www.thenile.dev/ (pg "distribution")
- https://www.yugabyte.com/ (not emphasizing serverless but their architecture would allow for it)
NathanFlurry · 2025-03-03
Yep.
Nile (https://www.thenile.dev/) is trying to address this use case with a fully isolated PG databases. Though, I don't know how they handle scaling/sharding.
ilkhan4 · 2024-09-26
It's been a while since I've looked at elastic pools in Azure, but maybe Neon (https://neon.tech/) or recently Nile (https://www.thenile.dev/) might work in terms of spinning up a bunch of separate logical DBs with shared compute/storage.
infra_dev · 2024-03-14
Nile is a Serverless Postgres that virtualizes tenants/customers. It is specifically built for SaaS companies similar to Figma https://www.thenile.dev/. I am the CEO of Nile.
refset · 2024-02-06
Better still, take a look at Nile's "tenant virtualization" concept: https://www.thenile.dev/
gwen-shapira · 2022-07-26
The blog explicitly said that if the requirements involve actual authorization models (beyond simple tenancy) then RLS is not the best fit (see: https://thenile.dev/blog/multi-tenant-rls#if-you-have-sophisticated-ac…
I think this covers both the complexity aspect and the difference between what you get from RLS and what external authz brings to the table (schema, for example).
I do think that RLS is a great way for a company without authz experts to built a multi-tenant MVP safely. I've yet to see a single pre-PMF company that worries about authorization beyond that, this is a series-B concern in my experience.
sintax · 2026-03-07
https://www.thenile.dev/blog/uuidv7#why-uuidv7 has some details:
"
UUID versions that are not time ordered, such as UUIDv4 (described in Section 5.4), have poor database-index locality. This means that new values created in succession are not close to each other in the index; thus, they require inserts to be performed at random locations. The resulting negative performance effects on the common structures used for this (B-tree and its variants) can be dramatic.
".
Also mentioned on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45323008
hboon · 2024-12-07
Not the answer you were looking for, but I had been shopping recently for slightly overlapping reasons (I want to ship projects, but they are all smaller MVPs that might run for a while and I didn't want to pay for 1 database service for each one on Render).
I found https://www.thenile.dev/pricing which supports which apparently supports unlimited databases.