Connecting to SQL database from Vercel/Next serverless functions?

Question

What's the best practice for connecting to an SQL database from Vercel/Next.js serverless functions? I've seen a few options commonly mentioned:

• Create a new direct database connection in the serverless function. This has important drawbacks:
  • Connection pooling: every new invocation of a serverless function would create its database connection, which could quickly overwhelm the database
  • Security: the database has to be publicly exposed since Vercel doesn't support static IPs or VPC peering. This unfortunately is deal-breaker for any security-sensitive application (fintech, healthcare, education, etc.) and SOC 2 compliance
• Add an intermediary service that receives HTTP requests and proxies it to the database
  • My understanding is that this is a common thing people do? How does this work?
• Use a vendor-specific solution, like the Prisma Data Proxy product (requires using the Prisma ORM) or AWS Aurora Data API (essentially an out-of-the-box version of the second option, now deprecated)

Trying to understand what the "best practice" solution to this problem is — have others deployed solutions they're satisfied with?

Answer 1

For personnel blog application should be okay to connect your edge function direct to database. Unless, this small website becomes super popular.

Eventually, For your application hosted on edge, another API endpoint is needed. It can be REST API or GraphQL does not matter. What matters is that, at the front this endpoint will accept loads of request from your edge functions (nodejs applications on vercel/netlify) and at the back, it will communicate with database, pool the connections and caching so on. You can add nginx load balancer in front of that API endpoint to make it scale. There are tons of options to engineer it