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Comment by pritambarhate | Hacker News Reader

Does any of you feel cheated by Google? Rather than improving the existing product and providing backward compatibility, Google has chosen to build a new product with its own proprietary API.

I have a client who has invested significant amount time and money in Firebase Realtime Database. Now with this move, I am not sure if Google will support Firebase Realtime Database for next 5 years. So a full rewrite might be needed.

Once more it seems that going Cloud Native on one of Google's proprietary tools is very risky. I know many of the readers will say that Firebase Real-time Database is still supported. But the main question is: will it stay supported for years to come?

Google please please make an announcement and make a commitment to keep Firebase Realtime Database alive for "X" years to come. Otherwise, you are just making us developers lose faith in you.

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[Firebase founder] To offer better querying, improve the data model, and increase scalability we had to build an entirely new database. The original technical choices we made as a startup weren't able to support the featureset Cloud Firestore has. Even if we tried to improve upon the existing Realtime Database product, we would have had to make breaking changes that would have required you to rewrite your code (and likely shipped a worse product).

Regarding deprecation: you can be comfortable continuing to build on the Realtime Database. We don't intend to deprecate either database, since both are useful in different situations, depending on what you're building. We recommend using the Realtime Database for a number of usecases[1]

We're not posting a "Realtime Database will be supported for X years" statement because many may interpret this as "the Realtime Database is deprecating in X years", which isn't the case.

[1] https://firebase.googleblog.com/2017/10/cloud-firestore-for-...

Thanks for the clarification. I certainly feel better with the confirmation. I hope it will give some certainty to thousands of developers out there who decided to make Firebase Realtime Database a critical component of their product architecture.

How would you propose shoe-horning a document database into Firebase realtime DB?

Can't you just pretend this new feature you just learned about 2 hours ago didn't exist if you don't want to use it?

Isn't releasing this very feature improving Firebase, like you're demanding?

This is a very reasonable comment, why is it downvoted so heavily?

its nearly impossible to make large non-breaking improvements to an existing production service ... so no, they did the right thing here.

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