Why this exists

On Free and Pro, every project shares one Postgres cluster with per-tenant schema isolation + RLS. We don't hand out direct connection strings on those tiers — the isolation model relies on you going through our authenticated surface (SDK, REST, MCP, edge functions with ctx.db.sql, the console SQL editor).

That covers most application code — but not tools that want to own the Postgres connection themselves:

• Payload CMS — Postgres adapter requires DATABASE_URL
• Prisma — same
• Drizzle — same
• Directus, Strapi (Postgres backend) — same
• Migration runners: Flyway, Liquibase, node-pg-migrate, sqlx
• Ad-hoc psql from your laptop

What Team unlocks

Every Team-tier project (and Legal-Team) gets its own dedicated Postgres instance in Scaleway fr-par — no shared cluster, no cross-tenant noise. That instance has its own connection string, exposed at Project → Database → Connection in the console.

Two roles: read-only (default — safe for analytics, debugging, most reads) and read/write (owner role — for migrations + writes). Both work with any Postgres client.

Client examples

// payload.config.ts
import { postgresAdapter } from '@payloadcms/db-postgres';

export default buildConfig({
  db: postgresAdapter({
    pool: { connectionString: process.env.DATABASE_URL },
  }),
});

// schema.prisma
datasource db {
  provider = "postgresql"
  url      = env("DATABASE_URL")
}

import { drizzle } from 'drizzle-orm/postgres-js';
import postgres from 'postgres';

const client = postgres(process.env.DATABASE_URL!);
export const db = drizzle(client);

psql "$DATABASE_URL"

Free / Pro alternatives

If you don't need direct connection, all Free/Pro projects can still work with tools that speak our SDK / REST — see chapters 4, 10, 23. When you're ready for a stack that wants raw Postgres, upgrade to Team from Project → Settings.