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FAQ

What databases are supported with Prisma Pulse?​

Prisma Pulse currently supports PostgreSQL v12 and higher. We'd love to hear which databases you would like to see supported next.

What database providers are supported with Prisma Pulse?​

Any PostgreSQL provider that enables you to enable logical replication is supported:

ProviderStarterProBusinessEnterprise
Railway✅✅✅✅
Supabase✅✅✅✅
Neon❌✅✅✅
AWS RDS✅✅✅✅

Note that because Neon doesn't provide superuser access to the database, you can't use Neon-hosted databases on the Starter plan.

Does Pulse store my database events?​

Pulse persists database events if you enable the Event persistence feature in your project via the Console. This lets you use the stream() API and take advantage of delivery guarantees.

How does persisting events impact pricing?​

If you enable Event persistence for your project, Pulse will store the events that happen in your database in the same shape that they're delivered.

Usage of the API is billed according to these factors:

  • Database events: The number of database events captured by Pulse
  • Events reads: The number of database events read and delivered by Pulse via .stream()
  • Event storage: The amount of disk space the stored events consume (in GiB)

How many Prisma Client instances can subscribe to a database event?​

The number of Prisma Client instances that can subscribe to via Prisma Pulse has the following limits:

  • 1000 subscribers for stream()
  • 20 subscribers for subscribe()

How can I increase the throughput for Prisma Pulse?​

Throughput for Prisma Pulse will increase as the database event size and the number of concurrent listeners decrease.

While limiting database event size can be tricky, we recommend some best practices, such as:

  • Avoid large fields in your model, such as storing base64 image strings in the database. Instead, consider storing them in popular file storage options such as AWS S3 or Cloudflare.
  • Creating publication slots for specific models rather than all the models in the database. You can learn more about managing your replication slots here.
  • Upgrading to use modern versions of PostgreSQL due to performance optimizations. Modern versions of PostgreSQL (v15+) allow you to create a publication slot for specific fields of a particular model.

Can I use Pulse in my front-end code?​

No, Pulse is server-side and subscriptions cannot be initiated directly within client-side code. If you would find this feature valuable, please share your thoughts on the #help-and-questions channel in our community Discord.

To propagate events to the frontend, you can use a WebSocket library like socket.io.

How can I ensure SSL/TLS encryption works in SSL-only mode with PostgreSQL database and Pulse?​

If you encounter issues with SSL/TLS encryption while using Pulse, ensure your database server has a valid SSL certificate and append sslmode=require to your database connection string in your project environment in Prisma Data Platform, for example:

postgres://username:password@hostname:port/database?sslmode=require

This setting will enforce SSL/TLS encryption and accept self-signed certificates.

How to configure tsconfig.json with the Pulse extension?​

If you're using "moduleResolution": "bundler" in your tsconfig.json file, you need to explicitly set customConditions to either node or workerd depending on your target runtime. This will instruct TypeScript to match the correct type definitions of the Prisma Pulse extension, as well as any other packages that expose multiple entrypoints:

// tsconfig.json
{
  "compilerOptions": {
    // ...other options
    "target": "es2022",
    "moduleResolution": "bundler",
    "customConditions": ["workerd"] // or "node"
  }
}

This is needed because Prisma Pulse extension offers separate implementations tailored for various runtimes, such as Node.js and Cloudflare Workers.

If you don't add this, you may run into the following error when using the @prisma/extension-pulse in your application code:

Cannot find module '@prisma/extension-pulse' or its corresponding type declarations.