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Comment by primitivesuave | Hacker News Reader

I second the Firebase recommendation. Facebook killed off their BaaS acquisition while Google doubled down on theirs. If you prefer open-source, Horizon (http://horizon.io/) is a great alternative to Firebase but does not have many of the key features like file storage and iOS/Android SDKs.

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Firebase has a few issues.

Take a look at this video and tell me this query and the required data denormalization is acceptable.

https://t.co/xd1KUPc8xY

They must be using something akin to Cassandra to require something like that

Yep data modelling and querying capabilities is a real deal breaker in Firebase.

Something as simple as filtering by 2 or more values becomes ridiculously tedious.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/26700924/query-based-on-m...

I completely agree that on its own, the querying functionality can be quite tedious for anything complex. I linked to this solution on the comment above as well: https://github.com/davideast/Querybase

> Querybase is in an experiment and not for production

Also since Firebase doesn't allow more than one filtering field with orderByChild(...) I'm guessing Querybase will do all the work on the client. This is less than ideal since the data has to be downloaded first.

Querybase is also making permutations of all the data you may wish to query. Needlessly taking up space on your server that will have to be retrieved. Wasted bandwidth etc.

I wouldn't call this an "issue" as much as a "limitation". Just as you can develop a data denormalization process for any use case, you can develop one for Firebase.

Here's a practical example of doing joins with Firebase (written by David East who is also the star of that video you linked): https://github.com/davideast/Querybase

I wrote this piece on Firebase recently and I would not recommend it except for very simple or specialised projects.

https://medium.com/@Pier/firebase-the-great-the-meh-and-the-...

Don't get me wrong, Firebase has a lot of good things going on, but the bad aspects make it unsuitable for a large variety of projects.

Watch out for the hidden costs.

As I found out today if you want the analytics data in CSV, or query it to any level that's useful beyond "We have 5 users in Stockholm on KitKat", you'll need the next service tier up, which is $25 per month per project.

But if you want basic analytics, then it's free & easy.

Horizon is a scary recommendation right now given the recent shuttering of RethinkDB (the company). It might still be a great choice, but I would give the community some time to coalesce and see where things end up before recommending it for new projects.

I really like Firebase, but for specialized cases as others mentioned. The realtime updates are solid, and the iOS SDK at least is deep enough to let you dig into edge cases when needed (like, how many clients are listening to this node?). But I use it like an in-memory store to sync live data. Can't imagine having to use it like a full database - I use Parse for storing more permanent data across tables.

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