Supabase Turns Its SQL Scratchpad Into a Notebook

Supabase started rolling out Notebooks on September 2, 2026, a feature preview that replaces the SQL Editor’s single-query scratchpad with a document that mixes runnable SQL cells and markdown notes, according to a changelog post from Supabase engineer charislam. The team frames it as the first piece of a bigger “Explorer” workspace meant to fuse querying with the dashboard’s AI Assistant.

---

What shipped

A notebook is a single document where query cells and markdown cells sit side by side, rather than one disposable SQL scratchpad per session. Supabase’s own framing in the changelog post: notebooks are for writing run-books and incident documentation, and for building reusable reports that keep a query and the context around it together, instead of a bare SQL string with no explanation of what it does or why. The feature is opt-in, toggled from the feature-preview section of the dashboard’s user menu, and Supabase says it’s being rolled out gradually rather than to every account at once. The existing SQL Editor stays in place; the post is explicit that “nothing you’re using today is going away.”

Supabase is also using the launch to solicit feedback directly in the discussion thread, asking users to flag bugs and call out where the workflow doesn’t fit. Combined with the gradual rollout, that points to Notebooks staying in preview for a while rather than shipping to general availability on a fixed date.

Why it matters: querying was disposable, incident response wants a record

A SQL Editor scratchpad is built to be thrown away: run a query, see the result, run the next one, and the history that mattered lives in muscle memory or a Slack thread if it survives at all. Both use cases Supabase names hit that gap directly. An incident run-book needs the queries that diagnosed the problem to sit next to the explanation of what they showed, so the next on-call engineer isn’t starting from a blank editor. A recurring report needs the same thing on a longer time horizon: the query, the context for why it’s shaped that way, and the note about the edge case it doesn’t handle.

Positioning Notebooks as step one of “Explorer” also signals where Supabase wants Studio to go: less a SQL Editor with a chat panel bolted on, and more a single workspace where writing a query, annotating it and asking the AI Assistant about it happen in the same document. Supabase’s Assistant already runs queries and returns results inline in chat; a notebook is the natural place to keep both the AI-generated query and a human’s note about it in one editable record instead of scattered across a chat transcript.

The take

Shipping this as an opt-in preview that leaves the existing editor untouched, while asking directly for the workflow feedback that will decide whether it gets built out further, is the low-risk way to test the bet. The open question is retention past the feature-preview phase. Plenty of dashboard experiments have quietly stalled at “preview” for a year or more, and a notebook that a team starts depending on for incident response needs a firmer commitment than a toggle in a menu. If Supabase means for this to become how teams keep institutional knowledge next to their data, it should say so. Until then, try it for a disposable run-book. Don’t bet a team’s only copy of an incident doc on it yet.