About Google Firestore and its Applications as your Database Solution

Google Cloud Firestore is a NoSQL, cloud-native document DBMS, a much faster and serverless DB. Firestore helps to simplify storing, syncing, and querying the data for web, mobile, and IoT applications. In combination with the other cloud applications, Firestore offers better scalability, availability, and security. It also ensures greater flexibility and scalability for enterprises of all sizes.

Leveraging their many years of experience and expertise in managing data-intensive applications of Search, Ad, Maps, and YouTube, Google has now introduced their Firestore with the objective of offering featured database solutions to the users by covering all their previous shortcoming ins terms of functionality, scalability, and performance.

Benefits of Google Cloud Firestore

Firestore is a comparatively newer offering from Google. So it comes to tackle many new-age challenges in terms of database management in the Big Data era. Let us see some of the most prominent features of Firestore, which makes it the most reliable choice for enterprise users.

1. Serverless cloud solution

Firestore is a serverless cloud solution, which is designed to simplify web and mobile application development. With the use of Firestore, the users need not have to set up an intermediary server for data access. Firestore is integrated with Google Cloud and Firebase, which is the mobile development platform of Google. As offering a serverless solution, Cloud Firestore is also highly effective in iterating, prototyping, and setting up and running a production system quickly and easily. You can also get live synchronization and offline support on Firestore.

2. Firestore combines the advantages of Google Cloud and Firebase

Firestore puts forth a fine collaboration of the Firebase with Google Cloud, thereby offering both worlds’ best. For example, it combines the technical expertise of Firebase Realtime and the scalability of Google Cloud. You can also get the benefit of an automatic upgrade.

3. High-end Data Handling Capacities

Firestore also offers advantages of ACID transactions, i.e., atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability. It can maintain the same across thousands of docs and collections. Firestore only requires less data denormalization or flattening as it is more structured and can utilize effective nesting of the objects. Firestore can also support indexed queries and enable the users to combine sorting and filtering on a single query. Firestore also offers atomicity, i.e., either executing all of them or nothing at all, transactions and write operations which can be batched atomically. It means that the transactions may keep on repeating until the completion of the transactions automatically.

4. Destined to scale

As we have said above, Google Cloud Firestore is a fast database, which is also destined to ensure a high degree of scalability with a very powerful infrastructure. By default, Google Cloud Platform offers horizontal scaling automatically, both in and out as per the load on the applications. Using Cloud Firestore, you can now easily organize and handle even complex and hierarchical data at scale and store the data as document collection and using sub-collections within the documents. Firestore is also a multi-region solution that can automatically scale. It features global scalability with high reliability as it can distribute the data across various data centers at various locations across the globe. Firestore can also let scaling up to one million connections and about 10,000 writes per second. For any confusion regarding database scaling needs, you may consult some expert providers like RemoteDBA.com.

5. Offering high-end security

Cloud Firestore can offer multi-region replications automatically and with strong consistency. This will make sure even with disaster strikes; your data remains safe and available.  Firestore ensures robust and flexible security for web and mobile applications, which follows the Cloud Firebase Security Rules. With Firestore, you can also get automated data validation features combined with proper validation and authorization. Firestore also allows users to write customized rules. Even though there are no loops, procedural statements, or assignments, it will let you write complex expressions, leading to the final truth or false value.

6. Cost-effective database solutions

Firestore is an affordable solution for smaller enterprises too. The pricing model is flexible, which charges only for the operations users perform on the database as the number of writes, reads, deletes, etc., adding to the network bandwidth and storage charges. Even though it is a combined cost structure, the overall usage costs of Firestore remains low. You can also check your usage with the number of writes and reads over a specific period.

7. Offline support

Google Cloud Firestore offers offline support also for web and mobile clients for both Android and iOS applications. So, when data changes at the backend, your application also can be updated in real-time. Firestore also offers built-in support, which can use local cache to serve and store data. It also features data syncing across different user devices, on being offline too. The Cloud Firestore app always remains responsive regardless of internet connectivity or network latency. It can write, read, listen, and query the data even when a device is offline. The changes made during the offline usage will be automatically synced with the cloud when the user gets back online next time.

Cloud Firestore is much easy to set-up, use, and super fast with all these features in place. It offers relentless cloud storage by featuring all benefits of maintaining a real-time DB. As we can see, Firestore is relatively new to the database industry and is getting improvement day by day over its forerunners as Firebase. In case of confusion you can contact a professional to help you.

When choosing a scalable cloud database for your enterprise applications, you may consider your project requirements to choose the best one. As we have seen here, Firestore has many positives to offer. Still, being a comparatively newer player in the market, you may be finding some shortfalls, also sometimes based on your unique DBMS requirements. Overall, Cloud Firestore can be considered a gift from Google by reflecting the provider’s enormous research and experience and the focus to offer the best to users.