I Moved My Next.js Dashboard Logic Into Postgres. My Frontend Got Boring (And That's the Point).

My dashboard had a useMemo doing arithmetic it had no business doing. It was a Pokémon TCG Pocket collection tracker, but that part doesn't matter. What matters is that the home page needed to show three things: overall completion, completion per set, and which set you were closest to finishing. The way I'd built it, the browser was fetching every card and every owned record, then grinding through the math on each render to figure all of that out. It worked. It also got slower and harder to read every time the data grew or I added a metric. So I moved the aggregation out of React and into Postgres, and the surprising result was that my frontend got boring . Fewer hooks, less state, almost nothing left to break. That's the whole argument of this post: aggregation belongs in the database, and when you put it there, the React code that's left over is the kind of boring you actually want in the layer your users touch. What "fetching everything into React" actually looks like Here's the shape of the original dashboard. Load all the cards, load the user's owned rows, then derive everything on the client. const [ cards , setCards ] = useState < Card [] > ([]); const [ owned , setOwned ] = useState < OwnedCard [] > ([]); useEffect (() => { ( async () => { const { data : allCards } = await supabase . from ( " cards " ). select ( " * " ); const { data : ownedRows } = await supabase . from ( " user_cards " ) . select ( " card_id " ); setCards ( allCards ?? []); setOwned ( ownedRows ?? []); })(); }, []); const ownedIds = useMemo (() => new Set ( owned . map (( o ) => o . card_id )), [ owned ]); const perSet = useMemo (() => { const groups : Record < string , { total : number ; have : number } > = {}; for ( const card of cards ) { const g = ( groups [ card . set_id ] ??= { total : 0 , have : 0 }); g . total += 1 ; if ( ownedIds . has ( card . id )) g . have += 1 ; } return groups ; }, [ cards , ownedIds ]); const overall = useMemo (() => { const total = cards . length ; const ha