I am building an application which uses SQFLITE(SQLITE) Database to save user's data by default.
I want that when users are logged in and online, this data is saved in Firebase, so that users can access their data from any device.
I have read that we'll have to create sync method to convert SFLITE's data to Firebase's NOSQL data. How exactly can I do this? Any useful links, examples, etc. would be really helpful.
P.S. I know Firebase has offline support, but it is not suited for my use case
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I have been introduced to Firebase a few days ago. Since then I have been trying to discover more features and usage of Firebase, in particular, the usage of the Firestore/Realtime Database.
However, as I am reading into more details, I start to think of some questions. I hope someone that is familiar with Firebase can help me answer them
As for User authentication, I understand that I can use Firebase Authentication where I won't see their real password. However, technically, everything that user stores in my Firestore would be visible to me since I am the owner of the Firebase.
For example, if I were to develop a note/chat app, in which the user can access their notes/chat on the iOS app and also Android. That means all their notes data would be saved in my database. If it happens to contain some private data, then I would be able to read it?
Even if I set security rules, that would be only facing client-side, whereas, for me, the owner of the entire firebase data, I could see the whole thing. Surely, as a customer, you won't want to use an app knowing that I can see everything you write
I am not sure if what I said is true or not. If true, is there a possible solution?
Both of your statements are correct. This happens in most of the apps-websites, the admin or some core developers have full access to the data. That's why privacy policy and GDPR exist. You must specify what data you collect and for what reason. If you intend to use your user data for any other reason you must inform them. Be aware that if you disclose any user information without his permission you can be held liable.
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 log the following user actions on my Firebase app:
sign in/out
page in/out
timestamp of action
Right now, I use my own function to log actions to the database location "root > user-logs > [user's id]".
Each action is logged as
[time in milliseconds] : [action]
These logs put a lot of data in my database.
However, I won't be accessing data stored at the user-logs locations, so my belief is that this won't lower the speed of read operations at other locations in the database.
Question 1: Is the above belief true?
Question 2: Is there a better way to log customized user actions?
I first thought of creating a csv file in Cloud Storage and appending user actions to the file, but then realized that in order to write to a csv file, I would first have to download it, so I decided that writing to the database would be much faster (and easier).
Thanks.
If you write data to a location that you don't read any data from, then that write operation will not affect operations that read data from somewhere else in your database.
But storing data that you're never going to read is unlikely. Otherwise there probably wouldn't be a reason to store it. More likely you're going to want to read/query this data at some point.
Given the append-only, every-growing nature of your log data, it is unlikely that Firebase will offer the query capabilities that you need at that point. Therefor I'd recommend storing your data in a system that is more tailored towards the use-case: storing lots of data and querying that. A perfect example of such a system is Google's BigQuery.
A common way to get the data into BigQuery is to keep doing what you do now from the client: write it into the database. Then create a Cloud Function that triggers on incoming log data from your database, writes that data to BigQuery, and then deletes it from the database.
With this approach you're only using the Firebase Database for transient storage, and do the heavy lifting in BigQuery.
I'm planning a web application that requires user auth, plus the ability to display data for the users that is stored in a database. No interaction between the users is needed (yet), however the users should be able create objects and query their "own" objects. For example I list 10 book names (10 book objects), and User A should be able to pick a book and create a new object, call it userNoteObject that contains the name of a choosen book and a short note (that he/she writes).
With a basic pseudo code one book object would look like this:
bookObj = {"id": 1, "name": "book name"}
And the user's note object would be something like this:
userNoteObject = {
"id": 1,
"book_name": "random book name",
"owner_userid": "a1b2c3d",
"note": "some random string"
}
With MySQL I would create three tables, one for the users and one for the userNoteObject-s and another for the bookObj-s. Everytime an user saves a note, I would add it to the table that lists the saved notes. Then I can simply query the notes that belongs to X user based on the user's owner_userid. It's a quite simple functionality.
After reading about the possibilities I've made a decision to go with Firebase Auth (because in the future I might need Android and iOS compatibility) + Google Cloud Datastore or Firebase Realtime Database. However I'm a little bit scared about the Realtime Database of Firebase since I've never worked any DB like it. I also like to be able to modify records manually with something like PhpMyAdmin and I assume Cloud Datastore has a visual interface like that.
I'm familiar with JSON handling and creating JSON files, however the JSON based database is strange for me at the moment. Therefore I'm thinking about that maybe the other option would be a better choice. It's very important that I don't need realtime db features. I would load X number of entries into the table that holds the bookObj-s and sometimes update them. I assume when the user creates an userNoteObject it would be saved quickly with both and after deleting an userNoteObject I could refresh the page close to realtime with Datastore. But the table that holds the book objects must be able to store millions of entries easily.
So the important things:
One db table should be able to handle millions of records easily
Easy as possible querying
Visual interface for the DB (if it's possible)
I don't need realtime features like dynamic game score display/saving
Other info:
I would like to use Angular.js
I'm familiar with Python if it can help in something
So my question is that which database would be better for my needs? At the moment I say Datastore, but I'm totally new with these services so I'm not really against the Realtime Database, but Datastore looks more suitable since it has a visual interface. However I'm also not sure that how would work Datastore with Firebase. If there is a third option like combining both, Realtime Database for the objects save by the user and the static objects for Datastore for example, I would love to hear about it too. My overall goal is to be able to write and query the db easy and fast as it's possible and easily use it with Firebase auth.
UPDATE: I just discovered Firebase's Cloud Firestore, so if it can be more useful I could use it.
If you are going to use Firebase I would recommend you use Cloud Firestore instead of either Cloud Datastore or Firebase realtime database. You get the benefits of a real-time database plus a true document based JSON data store. The one downside is that you don`t have a UI to interact with the data. Datastore has one but its not as robust as say PHPMyAdmin. And since these are NoSQL datastores SQL support is pretty limited.
If you really want a true relational back-end you could try Cloud SQL which is basically MySQL running on Google Servers.
For the Firestore console/UI, see https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/using-console. Is that the kind of thing you're looking for?
I am considering firebase for an app - mainly for the real-time but other features like the analytics and authentication (and price) are other bonuses.
I have my own database and I want everything saved in there. Firebase will have a small portion of the dataset I push as it's needed.
So I'm basically thinking that the firebase data will be read only to the users. If a user comments, that will actually go to my server, I'll authenticate, clean, whatever.. and push to the that feed.
Are there problems with this approach? Are there other (better) ways to solve the problem?
This is a completely valid approach. Firebase is designed so you can use specific features that suit your needs.