Looking for advice on my data structure in Firebase.
My app: Plant care reminders
I'm thinking the basic data structure can look something like this.
So the user can have many plants, and for each plant it can have many tasks.
I believe I would have a collection of users top level in Firestore, then each userData document would have a sub-collection of plants. Subsequently each plant would have a sub-collection of tasks.
The app will display all the users plants on one screen, that user can then click on a plant and view the tasks.
I would like the ability for the user to go offline for a period and still be able to access everything.
Is it wise to do one big query to retrieve all the data on the app load up? Doing this to make sure if they do go offline Firestore has all their cached sub-collections.
Or is it better to do a query on load up to get the users sub-collection of plants so they can see what they have, then when they click on a plant do another query to get that plants sub-collection of tasks?
If a user can see a plant, then goes offline and clicks that plant. Is it possible to query the plants sub-collection of tasks without network connection?
Apologies for poor explanation, trying to wrap my head round offline data persistence with Firestore and nested sub-collections when Firestore does shallow queries.
Firestore's disk persistence functions as a cache, maintaining data the app has recently loaded, and all local write operations that haven't been synchronized to the server yet.
I would like the ability for the user to go offline for a period and still be able to access everything.
This is inherently not a great match for how the Firestore disk cache works. To make it work in your use-case, you'd need to make sure to read all data, which will both drive up read operations and bandwidth consumption, and will also make the local cache runs more slowly than needed.
If you need a fully local database instead of a cache of recently read and locally modified data, Firestore might not be the best fit for this use-case. Consider using your own local database instead.
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Is there any situation where it makes sense to use both realtime and firestore in conjunction? What situations lend themselves more favorably to firebase realtime vs firestore, or a combination? I keep reading about horror stories of people getting hit with huge costs is there anyway to test before hand.
For context I am looking to work with an auction based market place of over 50,000 products. The idea is to be able to filter those products as needed, create, modify and delete bids for those products, favorite items and retrieve Users bids. From what I was reading the general suggestion (to keep cost low) for market places using firebase seems to suggest storing products in realtime db and the user objects, sales etc. in firestore. Kinds of queries I will need are find products with the lowest/highest bids, most favorited items, as well as fetching users current and purchases.
When would it be optimal to store in realtime vs firestore, from a cost perspective?
My current logic is to store the product objects in realtime since they will be referenced more frequently. Alternatively I am thinking it makes sense to store the user info, their bids, and purchases in one document in a firestore as that would incur just one read cost, and for a highly active user could result in a large amount of data to be transferred. Where I am confused comes with things like viewing the previous sales of a given product vs getting a user's previous sales, should sales be stored in realtime (as their own object or embedded in the product object) or firestore (embedded in the User doc) or both?
Looking at your app that you plan to make, let have a short talk regarding it.
A bidding app, first someone wants to sell their stuff so they post it in your app. Then every single user of your app may see it start bidding on it. Now as I don't know how your app is going to work but here's my assumption you will store the data of bidders and the bids they make in firebase realtime database.
This will involve lots of read, write operations. Now Firestore does offer you 20K operations/day, but if you cross the limit it will barely cost you $0.18/100K writes and $0.06/100K reads. Now the choice entirely depends on scale of your app. If your app has large number of audience, go for Realtime-Database. You can download upto 10GB of data per month for free and a dollar per GB beyond that. But this has a catch, if you stick to the spark plan, you can have only 100 simultaneous connections to the database so I doubt the performance if you have large number of users. It can go upto 200K using Blaze plan and that too per database. So if you create another database you will have more. I will personally suggest create multiple databases as per the region or any parameter to spread the traffic. [Again it's upto how many people use your app]
In my opinion, you should use the Firebase Realtime database your app. [Make sure you utilize the firebase storage as well for storing large photos of the things on sale].
Lastly, use firestore when you have less number of operations but are larger in size. Use firebase realtime database when you have many small tasks like updating the highest bid value or number of users currently bidding for a particular thing, use Realtime DB.
In my opinion, go for realtime database. I too use it for some game stuff like to store user stats and update it as the user progresses. This involves lots of read/write/update/delete operations so I stick with realtime-database.
When to use Firestore along with the real-time database?
As you have mentioned user profile, I will suggest use Firestore to store those credentials. Because user's won't generally update their profile so this won't cost much writes. Also the bidders would be much interest in bidding rather than watching others profiles. So even if if a few users check other's profile. This won't cost you much reads. But even if your app is designed in such a way that bidder must check seller's profile once, then firestore will definitely help you reduce usage of realtime database's [GB Downloaded] quota.
Every time someone queries data from your realtime database, you consume some part of the 10 GB of free download limit.
Also as I have mentioned the simultaneous connections to the database, if you host user profile data in Firestore then firestore will take care of profile visits so that bidders get faster response from your application. Just make sure you utilise all the free quotas from firebase storage, firestore and the realtime database and make sure your app is designed in such a way that it spreads traffic evenly between all services. Use the cloud functions on your back-end, and don't make your application [.apk] too heavy on client side as the app needs a lot to code.
So the conclusion, use firestore to store data which won't be accessed frequently like the user credentials and whatever stuff they have on sell. Use realtime database to store bidding data. Oh and yes, if you also want to store some stats like how many purchases has someone made or some information that changes too frequently put that in firebase realtime database. You can simply create a child node users/${username} and keep the frequent stuff in realtime database. This won't cost you much storage but take of that download limit. Shouldn't be expensive much especially talking of your app is going to address 50000 products XD.
I am looking to work with an auction based market place of over 50,000 products.
If you have comparatively less number of users, realtime database is sufficient but who knows when there may be a huge rise in your app users. So it's better to spread the data in both Firestore and Real-time database as mentioned above.
Just a caution: This is what I faced, then searched over stackoverflow and found this. Firestore counts READS even if you are just scrolling over the data tab in firestore. So make sure you don't just get surfing over there. I made 2 writes and was just looking at how the data is being stored and I already got 27 reads ...
I have a question about the best way to structure my Firebase database for my iOS app. The basic structure is that there are users and posts. The app will open and the user who is logged in will see all the posts that he/she has uploaded to the database (I may update this down the road so that users can see posts of users they follow). Is it better to have each post have a userId on it? Or is it better to have the an array of posts associated to each user?
If you can shard/partition the data so that you don't need to query a potentially very long list of that, that is always preferable with the realtime database.
So in your case, if you know that you want to show the user a list of their own posts as a starting point, it is a good idea to model that list in your database. You'd typically call this the user's feed or wall, depending on what your social network of choice is.
If you then later want to also show the posts of users they follow, you might want to store those posts in the user's wall. This type of data duplication may seem unnatural at first, but is quite common in NoSQL databases. In fact, this is the exact model that Firebase uses in its class FireFeed example.
To learn more about NoSQL data modeling, see:
NoSQL data modeling.
Firebase for SQL developers.
Getting to know Cloud Firestore, which is about Firebase's newer Firestore database, but has great tips that apply to the Realtime Database too.
I want to be sure that I can save data offline. How to synchronize data in Room with Firestore? When something inserted to Room Firestore must be updated as well.
Firestore already has a persistence layer included, you don't need Room at all. You can enable the offline support like this:
val settings = FirebaseFirestoreSettings.Builder()
.setPersistenceEnabled(true)
.build()
db.firestoreSettings = settings
Using Firestore for persistance has many benefits over Room (besides the saved effort and potential bugs). If you e.g. load all restaurants in a city, then go offline and then run a query on e.g. the best restaurants the query will still work and use the cached data even when the query was never run while being online.
You can also configure the cache size Firestore uses to meet your needs. Documents are cached in a LRU manner, so the documents which were not used for the longest time get removed from the cache first once it is full.
A best practice is to always use snapshot listeners. If you start a query in offline mode and the device gets back online, Firestore will automatically run the query again with the server and return the updated result to your UI.
Check out the docs and this video about Firestore offline mode for more details.
Update: Editing the question title/body based on the suggestion.
Firebase store makes everything that is publicly readable also publicly accessible to the browser with a script, so nothing stops any user from just saying db.get('collection') and saving all the data as theirs.
In more traditional db setup where an app's frontend is pulling data from backend, and the user would have to at least go through the extra trouble of tweaking the UI and then scraping the front end to pull more-and-more data (think Twitter load more button).
My question was whether it was possible to limit users from accessing the entire database in a click, while also keeping the data publicly available.
Old:
From what I understand, any user who can see data coming out of a Firebase datastore can also run a query to extract all of that data. That is not desirable when data itself is of any value, and yet Firebase is such an easy to use tool, it's great for pretty much everything else.
Is there a way, or a best practice, for how to structure the data or access rules s.t. users see the data, but can't just run a script to download all of it entirely?
Thanks!
Kato once implemented a simplistic rate limit for writes in Realtime Database security rules: Firebase rate limiting in security rules?. Something similar could be possible in Cloud Firestore rules. But this approach won't work for reads, since you can't update the timestamp at the same time the read is performed.
You can however limit what queries a user can perform on your database. For example, to limit them to reading 50 documents at a time:
allow list: if request.query.limit <= 50;
Google just released Cloud Firestore, their new Document Database for apps.
I have been reading the documentation but I don't see a lot of differences between Firestore and Firebase DB.
The main point is that Firestore uses documents and collections which allow the easy use of querying compared to Firebase, which is a traditional noSQL database with a JSON base.
I would like to know a bit more about their differences, or usages, or whether Firestore just came to replace Firebase DB?
I wrote an entire blog post all about this very question, and I recommend you check it out (or the official documentation) for a more complete answer.
But if you want the quick(-ish) summary, here it is:
Better querying and more structured data -- While the Realtime Database is just a giant JSON tree, Cloud Firestore is a little more structured. All your data consists of documents (which are basically key-value stores) and collections (which are collections of documents). Documents will also frequently point to subcollections, which contain other documents, which themselves can contain other documents, and so on.
This structured data helps you out in two ways. First, all queries are shallow, meaning that you can request a document without grabbing all the data underneath. This means you can keep your data stored hierarchically in a way that makes more sense to you without having to worry about keeping your database shallow. Second, you have more powerful queries. For instance, you can now query across multiple fields without having to create those "combo" fields that combine (and denormalize) data from other parts of your database. In some cases, Cloud Firestore will just run those queries directly, and in other cases, it will automatically create and maintain indexes for you.
Designed to Scale -- Cloud Firestore will be able to scale better than the Realtime Database. It's important to note that your queries scale to the size of your result set, not your data set. So searching will remain fast no matter how large your data set might become.
Easier manual fetching of data -- Like the Realtime Database, you can set up listeners in Cloud Firestore to stream in changes in real-time. But if you don't want that kind of behavior, and just want a simple "fetch my data" call, Cloud Firestore has that as well, and it's built in as a primary use case. (They're much better than the once calls in Realtime Database-land)
Multi region support -- This basically means more reliability, as your data is shared across multiple data centers at once. But you still have strong consistency, meaning you can always make a query and be assured that you're getting the latest version of your data.
Different pricing model -- While the Realtime Database primarily charges based on storage or network bandwidth, Cloud Firestore primarily charges based on the number of operations you perform. Will this be better, or worse? It depends on your app.
For powering a news app, turn-based multiplayer game, or something like your own version of Stack Overflow, Cloud Firestore will probably look pretty favorable from a pricing standpoint. For something like a real-time group drawing app where you're sending across multiple updates a second to multiple people, it probably will be more expensive than the Realtime Database.
Why you still might want the to use the Realtime Database -- It comes down to a few reasons.
That whole "it'll probably be cheaper for apps that make lots of frequent updates" thing I mentioned previously,
It's been around for a long time and has been battle tested by thousands of apps,
It's got better latency and when you need something with reliably low latency for a real-timey feel, the Realtime Database might work better.
For most new apps, we recommend you check out Cloud Firestore. But if you have an app that's already on the Realtime Database, I don't really recommend switching just for the sake of switching, unless you have a compelling reason to do so.
Reasons to choose Cloud Firestore over Realtime Database
It is an improved version
Firebase database was enough for basic applications. But it was not powerful enough to handle complex requirements. That is why Cloud Firestore is introduced. Here are some major changes.
The basic file structure is improved.
Offline support for the web client.
Supports more advanced querying.
Write and transaction operations are atomic.
Reliability and performance improvements
Scaling will be automatic.
Will be more secure.
Pricing
In Cloud Firestore, rates have lowered even though it charges primarily on operations performed in your database along with bandwidth and storage. You can set a daily spending limit too. Here is the complete details about billing.
Future plans of Google
When they discovered the flaws with Real-time Database, they created another product rather than improving the old one. Even though there are no reliable details revealing their current standings on Real-time Database, it is the time to start thinking that it is likely to be abandoned.
Suggest link from google as well :
Firebase Real-time Database vs FireStore
Extracted from google docs, a small sumamry here:
FireBase Real Time DB is JSON based NO SQL DB, meant for mobile apps, regional, and used typically to store and sync data between users/devices in realtime / extremely low latency.
FireStore is JSON 'like' NOSQL DB meant for high concurrency, global, easily auto scaling persistence, designed for any clients (not only mobile apps) with typical use cases such as asset tracking, real time analytics, building retail product catalogs, social user profile, gaming leaderboards, chat based applications etc.
Cloud Firestore is Firebase's database for mobile app
development. It builds on the successes of the Realtime Database with
a new, more intuitive data model. Cloud Firestore also features
richer, faster queries and scales further than the Realtime Database.
Realtime Database is Firebase's original database. It's an efficient,
low-latency solution for mobile apps that require synced states
across clients in realtime.
To choose between Firebase Realtime database and Cloud firestore based on your application requirements, read official documentation here.