The day of 3rd October 2017 came with the launch of a fully managed NoSQL database from Firebase, Cloud Firestore. Whether you want to store and sync data globally, whether your app has scaled beyond your imagination or whether you want offline access to your data, Cloud Firestore has all the features to handle any amount of data in any way. And not just that, the main appeal of Firestore is the intuitive and simple design that forms the basis of Firebase.
Key Attractions
Real-time data synchronization
The SDKs for Android, iOS, and Javascript synchronize data almost instantly making it the perfect candidate for reactive apps. As a result, building collaborating apps or maintaining data consistency is easily possible. And even if your app doesn’t need data synchronization, data fetching whenever needed is also equally powerful.
Automatic data replication with great consistency
Cloud Firestore automatically replicates the data across various regions thus making it robust against natural disasters. And the data remains strongly consistent throughout the replicas. As a result, you get a robust and scalable database with no efforts required from our part.
Offline Data Access
Cloud Firestore also has a feature to store an on-device database which makes it possible to use the app even when you have a problem with connectivity. Offline mode is available for Android, iOS, and Web.
SDKs available for everything major
Apart from Android, iOS, and Web, Firestore SDKs are also available for Node, Python, Go, and Java server. This makes it easy to use Firestore in your apps.
Hierarchical data structure and expressive querying
Collections and documents structure your data easily and intuitively. You can build hierarchies based on the relation between data and retrieve it using expressive queries. The speed of query execution depends on the size of the result rather than the size of the data. That means the same query will take equal time whether the dataset on which the query is executed contains 100 records or 10,000 records.
Serverless Development
There are many tedious functions that are just a matter of a few lines in the Firestore. The client-side SDKs include various levels of authentication and networking code. The backend has various security rules that control access to data. Thus, both these features enable you to connect the app directly to the database
The good old Firebase family
The rest of the Firebase family entirely supports Firestore. You can easily configure Cloud Functions to run custom code. Similarly, integration with other Firebase features is also possible. So, you can continue using and utilizing the Firebase features alongside the new Firestore.
Cloud Firestore and Google platform
Cloud Firestore was built in close collaboration with the Google Cloud Platform team. This automatically means that it is fully managed and built to automatically scale. Firestore also replicates data for speed and disaster management. The biggest priority of all is to provide a great server-side experience for backend developers.
The best of both
Firebase already offers a Realtime database. Then what was the need for yet another database? Actually, Firestore is the extension of the Firebase Realtime database which comes with some extra and handy features like compound queries, improved offline capabilities, hierarchical data structure, etc.
So, that’s almost everything there is to know about the new Cloud Firestore. It is currently available in beta version. Big brands like CNN, Home Away, Guesswork, etc have already adopted Firestore. So, why not you? Go on, explore, experiment and reach the new horizons.
