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I built UTAK Inventory Management System mainly as a way to refresh and deepen my understanding of relational databases, specifically PostgreSQL. Most of my recent projects use MongoDB, so while this wasn’t my first time working with SQL, it had been a while since I designed structured schemas with proper relationships, constraints, and normalization. I also took this opportunity to learn database versioning through migrations and tried using Prisma ORM to define and manage my schema more easily with TypeScript, Node.js, and Express.js.
Everything worked fine locally, but deployment was a different story. My backend was hosted on Render and my database on Supabase, and I kept running into connection issues. After debugging for hours, I found out that Render blocks ports 5432 and 6543 — which Prisma relies on for PostgreSQL connections. I could have switched to another hosting platform that allows those ports, but I didn’t have the resources, and Render is the best free option for hosting a small backend like mine. So instead of switching platforms, I refactored the backend to use the native pg library (similar to how Strapi connects to Supabase).
After restructuring my database connection logic, everything worked smoothly in production. The frontend is built with Next.js, Tailwind CSS, and Shadcn UI, and the whole system is deployed across Vercel, Render, and Supabase.
This project ended up being more than just an inventory system — it became a practical lesson in database design, ORM tradeoffs, and solving real-world deployment constraints with limited resources.