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Comment by itcmcgrath | Hacker News Reader

Product manager for Cloud Firestore here. We extremely grateful for all the amazing beta program customers and all the feedback they've given us.

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Hi.

As a student developing a system for a friendly NGO I must say that having angularfire integrate with Angular made this an instapick because I wanted to get started asap.

The issue now is that it really feels like the docs need more examples. I'd take 4-6 hours to add a new feature and I'd spend them reading the docs. Sometimes I'm not sure if I don't get something or it's a missing feature.

I guess the community is still growing but it's really hard to find answers to some simple problems.

angularfire has an inactive gitter and there isn't one for firebase specifically. It would be really amazing if firebase devs could take some time to answer the community on gitter or something, at least at the beginning before there's more people knowing the answers.

EDIT: Found your link to the google group. I guess I'll ask there then :)

Thanks for the feedback. Feel free to send any feedback on missing examples/tutorials that would have made things easier to our discussion group (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/google-cloud-firesto...). Our tech writers see the feedback and use it to help plan their work.

AngularFire lead here, I'd recommend you check out our GDE Jeff Delaney's community here https://angularfirebase.com for AngularFire related content. He has tutorials, lessons, and maintains a very active Slack Channel.

There's also the Firebase community Slack https://firebase.community/ and firebase-talk is our supported community channel for all things Firebase https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/firebase-talk

Hi Dan,

any chances you and your team are working on a GraphQL access layer for the Firestore?

It feels like nested queries(using refs for relations), basic mutations and (especially) graphql subscriptions would be a great match with Firestore and a big improvement in dev experience, imho.

We aren't, but we know customers to create GraphQL access layers themselves.

The point of having a GraphQL layer is not having to make it ourselves.

https://aws.amazon.com/appsync/

https://hasura.io/

I have created a GraphQL layer over the top of Firebase and while it was pretty easy to do so using Cloud Functions, I agree that it would be great if Firebase offered this out of the box without needing to do all of the work you currently have to, to use it.

I'm a big fan of firestore and live in Colorado. Are there any community events that you host or recommend that would allow me to talk to you, other people at Google, or other firestore community members?

I'll talk to our Developer Relations team in Colorado to follow up!

I like cloud firestore and firebase platform very much. It would be nice to have more query features. A simple "!=" is not possible.

Also an automatic backup would be nice (and can't be that hard to offer?).

We're looking at more comprehensive backup solutions, but in the meantime we have a fully managed export system you can schedule (https://cloud.google.com/firestore/docs/manage-data/export-i...) with the added benefit of this exports being importable into BigQuery for ad-hoc analytics (https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/loading-data-cloud-fi...)

Hi, I’ve enjoyed using Firestore so far, but one aspect I find very limiting is the fact that you are limited to one Firestore database per Google Cloud project. Are there any plans to change this? Allowing multiple Firestore databases would make setting up staging and testing environments much easier.

Usually you should use separate projects for this. Dev, staging, production projects - separated permissions, rate limits and costs

Hi there. :) I'm an engineer on the Cloud Firestore team. I can't speak to if or when we'll be able to remove this restriction, but please know that the folks working on this (like me) are very aware of what a pain in the butt this is. I'm sorry that I can't give you a more satisfying answer, but I hope we'll be able to change this soon. Thanks for being a customer!

I love Firestore, using it pay per go to push a lot of bytes, even some logs to see them real-time sync in browser and it scales really well and it is cheap.

I've used Cloud Firestore extensively in some of my personal projects. I also have lots of feedback and suggestions I'd love to share with you if interested. Is there still a way to participate in this program or get in touch with you?

Our discussion group has a lot of the team, including me, on it: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/google-cloud-firesto...

What open source components does Cloud Firestore use?

Can you point towards papers that describe the algorithms and data structures that Firestore uses? What infrastructure does it rely on to perform reliably?

This isn't true, but Cloud Spanner is awesome too!

It's probably better said that Cloud Firestore and Cloud Spanner share common infrastructure.

For example, Cloud Firestore uses TrueTime to provide similarly strong consistency guarantees to Cloud Spanner (see https://cloud.google.com/spanner/docs/true-time-external-con...)

I'm not aware of any whitepapers describing the listen feature that provides real-time updates.

The backend is almost entirely custom, though many common low-level open-source components are used pervasively. For example, for components written in C++ we use Abseil, Google Test, etc.

The SDKs are all open source and make use of other open source components:

  * Android: https://github.com/firebase/firebase-android-sdk/tree/master/firebase-firestore
  * iOS: https://github.com/firebase/firebase-ios-sdk/tree/master/Firestore
  * Web: https://github.com/firebase/firebase-js-sdk/tree/master/packages/firestore

For example, the iOS SDK uses LevelDB for local key-value storage and gRPC for communication with the backend.

You can find language specific libraries for many popular languages under the GoogleAPIs org on GitHub. To install, go to the defacto package manager for the specific language.

* .NET: https://github.com/googleapis/google-cloud-dotnet/tree/maste...

* Go: https://github.com/googleapis/google-cloud-go/tree/master/fi...

* Java: https://github.com/googleapis/google-cloud-java/tree/master/...

* Node.js: https://github.com/googleapis/nodejs-firestore

* PHP: https://github.com/googleapis/google-cloud-php-firestore

* Python: https://github.com/googleapis/google-cloud-python/tree/maste...

* Ruby: https://github.com/googleapis/google-cloud-ruby/tree/master/...

I'm interested in learning about Firestore architecture and how it solves difficult problems to understand and trust it. I'm not interested in client libraries.

Sorry I misunderstood. I was simply sharing additional open source components that are part of the Firestore ecosystem. Best of luck in your search.

Why can’t I use it in the same app as cloud data store to build new functionality on the modern api?

What's the status of Firestore under the BAA along with the other Fire* services?

Cloud Firestore supports HIPAA compliance, we are working to update the documentation here: https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance/hipaa/#covered-...

I didn't know this -- this is very very cool! I remember following an old google group of people who were waiting for that support.

Thanks for posting this! I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned in the OP.

Thanks for the great product. Will support for geo queries be added anytime soon?

Thanks! It's something we're discussing, but won't be "soon".

Waiting for geoqueries also. Would make a bunch of features in a few of my apps so much easier.

Is it a BaaS? Where does it fit in in the landscape?

"Serverless", hey?

Yes, it runs on racks of Google Pixel devices rather than servers. (I jest)

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