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Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

firebase.googleblog.com

21–30 of 174 posts

Re: Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

#21
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…

What's your story on ACID, particularly on transactions?

Transactions: If I want to insert 2 documents, but zero if either fails, what does that look like with Firestore?

And if I store a document and run a query milliseconds later, will the query include document I just stored? Or are queries eventually consistent?

Re: Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

#22
I’m still looking for a product that provides firebase-levels of ease of getting up and running (no API to design, rule-based authentication, etc) , but runs on your own infrastructure, off of a traditional RDBMS.

Someone tell me they’ve found the holy grail?!

Re: Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why the downvote ? The person is polite and genuinly doesn't know something. Just answer. Besides, a "document database", like many term in computing, can be very confusing. Come on, we all had to be explained what the difference is between a software server vs hardware. This is not different.

> Why the downvote? Smells like ring voting: 4 downvotes in < 0.5 min? @dang?

French person here.

What's ring voting ?

Re: Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

#24
post #21
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…

What's your story on ACID, particularly on transactions? Transactions: If I want to insert 2 documents, but zero if either fails, what does that look like with Firestore? And if I store a document and run a query milliseconds later, will the query include document I just stored? Or are queries eventually consistent?

Cloud Firestore has support for transactions: https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/manage-data/updat...

So yes, if any of the operations in the transaction fails (and cannot be retried) the whole transaction will fail. It's atomic as you'd expect. If you've ever used transactions in Firebase Realtime Database you'll be happy to know that the transactions in Cloud Firestore are much easier to use since they don't require selecting a common data parent.

Queries are always strongly consistent. If you do a write-read sequence you'll see the value of the latest write.

Re: Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

#25
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…

Regarding offline mode. How is sync done? Is this OT based? How are conflicts resolved?

Re: Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

#27
post #22

I’m still looking for a product that provides firebase-levels of ease of getting up and running (no API to design, rule-based authentication, etc) , but runs on your own infrastructure, off of a traditional RDBMS. Someone tell me they’ve found the holy grail?!

You can use Apache usergrid or the open source version of parse for example.

Re: Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

#28
post #21
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…

What's your story on ACID, particularly on transactions? Transactions: If I want to insert 2 documents, but zero if either fails, what does that look like with Firestore? And if I store a document and run a query milliseconds later, will the query include document I just stored? Or are queries eventually consistent?

[deleted]

Re: Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

#29
post #14

Grats! Can you talk a bit about your consistency model?

Sure, it's strongly consistent on the server-side part (strict serializability), whereas for the mobile/web clients we make sure we move you through consistency snapshots with the real-time sync functionality.

Congratulations on the release!

> multi-region replicated database [..] once data is committed, it's durable [...]

> strongly consistent on the server-side

Do you mind elaborating a bit more here? Around perhaps what happens underneath the hood when failing over, etc. Do you have a single "co-ordinator" of sorts ensuring strict serializability, if so what do you do when failing this over? Or is it a quorum based approach like Paxos/Raft?

Re: Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

#30
How is the pricing? Firebase Realtime Database is fairly expensive ($5/GB of storage per month), so it makes economic sense for developers to migrate to their own backend once they hit a certain scale. This is why third-party mobile backends are nowhere near the popularity of non-mobile backends with Google Cloud / AWS.

Do you think $0.18 per 100000 writes solves this problem?

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