On: Cloud Firestore: A New Document Database for Apps

[deepsun]

Sounds interesting, but is there any independent description of what it cannot do, or what would be hard to do?

I just noticed it's much easier to understand a new datastore by reading its limitations (usually carefully omitted from pr articles or documentation).

For example, I suspect that Firestore must be built on top of Spanner infrastructure, as it's the only way to get usable cross-datacenter many-row transactions. And Spanner's limitation is it's high price. And if it's not Spanner, but more like Cloud Datastore or the old Megastore, then there should be limitations on transactions.

Sounds amazing anyway, more datastorage choices is always better for the world.

[habosa → deepsun]

We try to be honest about what the product can't do natively and provide best practices, take a look at the "solutions" section of the documentation: https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/solutions/

For example Cloud Firestore can't do native full text search, but we made sure it's easy to integrate with a search provider like Algolia.

As for your guess about Spanner, you're right that Cloud Firestore uses the same technology as Cloud Spanner to ensure consistency at scale.

Would love to know what you think about the product once you've tried it!

[itcmcgrath → deepsun]

We've also tried to be transparent and document our current limits here: https://firebase.google.com/docs/firestore/quotas