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Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

firebase.googleblog.com

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Re: Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

#141

Post by techdragon »

steego wrote: post #107
insomniacity wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How goes the work to improve customer service and support? Thinking about https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14359801 , what improvements have you made in the last 139 days that would make us want to build on this?

For their own sake, I hope the team gives this question attention and respect. What sets Amazon apart from many other companies is their reputation for relentless customer service. Customers pay close attention to the quality of answer or lack of answers to questions like this one. Every cloud company that asks us to invest our time in their proprietary API is asking us to trust them. If you violate one vocal custome…

For me it's pretty easy. I want to start hearing and seeing positive anecdotes about real time communication with Google Cloud support. That is to say, I want to hear people start saying things like "I rang them, and everything was sorted out" ideally with a platitude attached like "it was actually a pretty good experience".

I hear this about AWS all the time, and I've even experienced it myself. One client some time ago had an AWS novice who was confident they could handle setting up the auto-scale groups. They made a small mistake, which lead to the scaling trigger being permanently on, and it auto scaling to 1024 ec2 nodes within the first half hour. Immediately after deploying a fix for the scaling trigger, I phone AWS to see if there was anything that could be done about the cost of this accident, and I had a small monthly credit to compensate, and a respectable discount on the next appropriate AWS training course so that the novice could learn more and hopefully avoid future mistakes.

THAT is the kind of story I want to start hearing about Google Cloud. "I used it and did not have problems", and "It works and was cheaper than AWS" is just not enough.

Re: Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

#142

Post by ralusek »

Couple of questions. For the querying:

https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/query-data/querie...

It seems as though there is just the capability for AND logic between the WHERE queries, is that correct. Is the any plans to add AND/OR and perhaps a concept for representing grouping like parentheses?

And for the data structures:

https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/manage-data/struc...

Is there any capability to perform joins or have the data populated at query time?

And for the last thing:

It is mentioned multiple times in the documentation that nested collections will not be deleted if the parent is deleted. I'm just curious why there isn't the capability to insert a document with options that would allow something like a cascade delete. Since you allow indexes on collections, there is obviously some sort of metadata maintained, why not just add an additional flag that could be set so that whenever a record is deleted it can optionally have its subcollections removed as well?

Re: Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

#144

Post by paulsharratt »

jamest wrote: post #2

[Firebase founder] This new database has been in the works for 2.5 years, since shortly after we joined Google. It was developed in close collaboration with the Cloud Datastore[1] team, and uses Google’s core database infrastructure. We built it because we know it can be challenging to build complex apps with our original database -- Firebase Realtime Database -- where we optimized for ease-of-use & real-time sync ov…

Good work guys, sounds like good progress!

I'm struggling to see what this is giving me that I didn't have with RTDB though

The queries seem to be doing what orderByChild equalTo startAt endAt limitToFirst and limitToLast were already allowing.

Is there mostly a performance gain, or am I missing something that I can do now that I couldn't do before?

Cheers

Re: Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

#145

Post by paulsharratt »

paulsharratt wrote: post #144
jamest wrote: post #2

[Firebase founder] This new database has been in the works for 2.5 years, since shortly after we joined Google. It was developed in close collaboration with the Cloud Datastore[1] team, and uses Google’s core database infrastructure. We built it because we know it can be challenging to build complex apps with our original database -- Firebase Realtime Database -- where we optimized for ease-of-use & real-time sync ov…

Good work guys, sounds like good progress! I'm struggling to see what this is giving me that I didn't have with RTDB though The queries seem to be doing what orderByChild equalTo startAt endAt limitToFirst and limitToLast were already allowing. Is there mostly a performance gain, or am I missing something that I can do now that I couldn't do before? Cheers

I'll answer myself here for anyone else trying to figure out what we can do with queries now:

---

We can now apply a filter and sort in the same command

We can chain filters, though they can only apply to one field if they specify a range

We can make a query that will only return documents, not the subfield data (i.e. what a lot of us were doing with the deprecated REST interface shallow=1)

Queries in large data sets will be faster I guess?

Things it'd still be nice to see -

References that allow you to pull down related documents with a single query

OR queries

---

It's been a bit of rollercoaster seeing this announcement..

"Oh wow we can do proper queries now! Oh wait no, the queries don't seem to allow more than what we had before.. oh wait there are some improvements, it's a bit better now.. oh the shallow querying will be super handy! and they do geopoints.. but don't appear to have any way of searching for radius.. but they say they will soon"

Anyway, good work all the same :)

Re: Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

#147

Post by rothbardrand »

stefano wrote: post #75

I don't like this trend of creating new closed source database systems that only exist on a single cloud provider. Your data is your most valuable asset, and by using this you're locking it inside Google servers. If they decide five years from now to discontinue it, or to raise the pricing 10x, you're screwed. Are most developers only working on short term projects? Why would you put yourself in such a situation inst…

Plus Couchbase does the same thing, is open source, and has been in production for quite awhile.

It seems a lot of developers use the HN stack: eg things thatvwent thru YC or that they hear other devs talking about a lot on HN.

Re: Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

#148

Post by alberteinstein »

hmexx wrote: post #139
pcnix wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should check out Hasura ( https://hasura.io/ )! It is exactly what you're asking about. Disclaimer: I work at Hasura. Feel free to ask me anything you want to know about.

FYI, I couldn't even get it running because "hasuractl.exe local start" is not a valid command with the version of hasuractl (0.1.12) you have available for windows on this page: https://docs.hasura.io/0.14/ref/cli/hasuractl.html :(

Sorry about that, we have deprecated local feature, but yeah docs lag behind.

Please login to https://dashboard.hasura.io and create a free trial project.

Re: Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

#149

Post by marksomnian »

alberteinstein wrote: post #148
hmexx wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI, I couldn't even get it running because "hasuractl.exe local start" is not a valid command with the version of hasuractl (0.1.12) you have available for windows on this page: https://docs.hasura.io/0.14/ref/cli/hasuractl.html :(

Sorry about that, we have deprecated local feature, but yeah docs lag behind. Please login to https://dashboard.hasura.io and create a free trial project.

"but runs on your own infrastructure, off of a traditional RDBMS"

"exactly what you're asking about"

"deprecated local feature"

Eh?

Re: Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

#150

Post by sampl »

nkw wrote: post #19

This is great. I had a feeling something like this was coming given most firebase people were pretty open about what the shortcomings of the Realtime DB were and AngularFire received some much needed attention to its database API last week. That said, I really hope there are plans for some full text search ability beyond the current suggestions[1]. I would very much like to ditch Elasticsearch in favor of db engine p…

I struggled with this too, but recently started using a small backend cloud function to send updates to Algolia (and query docs straight from the front end with the Algolia js script).
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