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It’s sad how people don’t use things for their intended use case. The main thing you’re buying with firebase is scalability

paulgb 4y ago
“Intended” according to whom? The firebase landing page makes a couple references to being scalable, but otherwise it doesn’t appear that using Firebase at a smaller scale is outside its intended scope at all.
- endisneigh 4y ago
  Intended accordingly to the technology, not marketing
  - paulgb 4y ago
    What does “intended according to the technology” even mean? Just because software is built to scale up, doesn't mean that using it at a smaller scale goes against its intention. Marketing copy aside, it's not as if the technical docs discourage people from using it for non-scale use cases.
    - endisneigh 4y ago
      It’s a key value store. People complain about that it doesn’t have joins. It’s not a relational database. Just one example. It works best as a simple document store.
      - paulgb 4y ago
        Ah, gotcha, I see the connection now.
- duxup 4y ago
  A large amount of the tutorial videos out there make scalability without having to really think about it a big selling point, among others.
fakedang 4y ago
The scalability argument does not fly with me. Realtime Database is not scalable, and you will eventually need to use sharding to get it to work with reasonable amounts of data. Cloud Firestore is designed to extract as much money from you based on the structure of their pricing model - you are compelled to make unnecessary reads and duplicated writes in order to make comparable operations. If you want a scalable Nosql, why wouldn't you go for something like mongoDB cloud, which is far less likely to burn your startup's pockets? The most definitive use case for Firebase is its Realtime capability, which makes it useful for gaming particularly but also team-based apps. But Supabase is just getting started with their Realtime capability - I expect to see more progress from them while Firebase deteriorates under the cloud of Google (pun intended).

paulgb 4y ago

“Intended” according to whom? The firebase landing page makes a couple references to being scalable, but otherwise it doesn’t appear that using Firebase at a smaller scale is outside its intended scope at all.

endisneigh 4y ago
Intended accordingly to the technology, not marketing
- paulgb 4y ago
  What does “intended according to the technology” even mean? Just because software is built to scale up, doesn't mean that using it at a smaller scale goes against its intention. Marketing copy aside, it's not as if the technical docs discourage people from using it for non-scale use cases.
  - endisneigh 4y ago
    It’s a key value store. People complain about that it doesn’t have joins. It’s not a relational database. Just one example. It works best as a simple document store.
    - paulgb 4y ago
      Ah, gotcha, I see the connection now.
duxup 4y ago
A large amount of the tutorial videos out there make scalability without having to really think about it a big selling point, among others.

fakedang 4y ago

The scalability argument does not fly with me. Realtime Database is not scalable, and you will eventually need to use sharding to get it to work with reasonable amounts of data. Cloud Firestore is designed to extract as much money from you based on the structure of their pricing model - you are compelled to make unnecessary reads and duplicated writes in order to make comparable operations. If you want a scalable Nosql, why wouldn't you go for something like mongoDB cloud, which is far less likely to burn your startup's pockets? The most definitive use case for Firebase is its Realtime capability, which makes it useful for gaming particularly but also team-based apps. But Supabase is just getting started with their Realtime capability - I expect to see more progress from them while Firebase deteriorates under the cloud of Google (pun intended).