We often take PostgreSQL features like JSONB, Row Level Security (RLS), and Point-In-Time Recovery (PITR) for granted. Yet, these powerful features we know and love weren’t always available; they’re the result of over 30 years of dedicated development and almost 61000 Git commits. Curious about this rich history, I decided to create an interactive timeline showcasing major PostgreSQL features and releases. To build this efficiently, I turned to Replit and Vercel v0 to build a website scraper and a Next.js UI. If you’re eager to see the final product now, check it out here!

Scraping PostgreSQL’s History with Replit

Replit is an online coding environment where you can quickly spin up projects with nothing but natural language using their AI Agent, while also giving you the flexibility to directly interact with your code, environment’s shell, and database all from the browser. What’s more, Replit has great integration with Neon Postgres so we can easily store all our data.

First up was scraping PostgreSQL’s official website to gather a complete history of release notes. Using Python and BeautifulSoup on Replit, I gave the AI agent sample HTML from both the PostgreSQL releases page and individual release notes, then with a clear prompt outlining my goal, the agent generated a working scraper within minutes. Not much later, I could see logs streaming in as it processed every page.

The scraper was able to fetch data from 523 releases across 33 major versions, with each release note averaging over 1300 words.. There was absolutely no way I was going to sift through over half a million words, so I again turned to Replit. To identify the most significant features from the mountain of release notes, I asked the agent to build me an ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) script that loaded all the notes, passed them through the OpenAI API with a prompt to identify the most important features, then stored the resulting bullet points in a new table. After a few iterations and minor tweaks, I watched the logs come in showing me all the releases being processed.

Neon Postgres was already integrated into my workflow thanks to Replit, so I simply took a quick glance at the Neon console, and there it was: rows upon rows of processed release notes and bullet points. 

Visualizing the Timeline with Vercel v0

Vercel v0 is a specialized AI agent with in-depth knowledge on modern web technologies, making it remarkably good at creating attractive, interactive frontends. Coming from Vercel, the team behind Next.js, the agent is finely tuned for this framework, making it the obvious choice for our purpose.

I provided v0 with the data schema and a rough outline of the desired look and feel for the application. In no more than three prompts, v0 generated a fully functional and visually appealing timeline that displays key PostgreSQL features over time. What’s more, thanks to Next’s server actions, there was no need to create a separate API to query the database. Deployment was equally effortless, as you can deploy your website with just one click all from within v0.

Since the scraper also got all the minor releases, I thought it would be a waste not to use that data too. So, I asked v0 to a create Gantt chart to show the lifespan of each PostgreSQL major version, and was surprised with how well the first attempt turned out.

Conclusion

Working on this project was an incredible experience. Combining Replit for the scraping, v0 for the UI, and Neon Database for storage I was able to create a full stack application with nothing but natural language. The final product is a dynamic, interactive website that celebrates over 30 years of PostgreSQL innovation, using data that I automatically gathered and processed myself. The site is hosted for free by Vercel, check it out and explore PostgreSQL’s rich history for yourself!