Brian Dorsey and Mark Mirchandani are talking intro to Firestore this week with fellow Googler Allison Kornher. Allison, a Cloud Technical Resident, starts the show telling us about the program and how it brought her to Firestore.

Allison takes us through the differences between SQL and NoSQL databases and describes the four categories of NoSQL databases: family, document, key value, and graph. Firestore is a scalable, flexible NoSQL document database. To illustrate the uses and benefits of Firestore, Allison walks us through a delicious pizza example. Each document in the database belongs to a collection, which is used to organize these documents. Firestore documents are assigned an identifier and can be quickly changed and called within their collections. Because these documents are stored in an implicit schema in key value pairs, developers have control over the details of database organization and data change and growth are easy to manage. The availability of subcollections further adds to the flexibility of Firestore database design.

Choosing a database type will depend on the situation, and Allison suggests this starts with a look at CAP theorem. If a document database is your database of choice, Allison gives our listeners tips for getting started with Firestore and clearing any hurdles along the way.

Allison Kornher

Allison is a Cloud Technical Resident and has worked helping startups looking to join GCP and in the Premium Tier Cloud Support organization with a focus on Storage.

Cool things of the week

• BigQuery admin reference guide: Tables & routines blog
• Top 25 Google Search terms, now in BigQuery blog
• Three security and scalability improvements for Cloud SQL for SQL Server blog
• GCP Podcast Episode 247: Cloud SQL Insights with Nimesh Bhagat podcast
• GCP Podcast Episode 163: Cloud SQL with Amy Krishnamohan podcast

Interview

• Cloud Firestore site
• Cloud Firestore Documentation docs
• Cloud Firestore explained: for users who never used Firestore before blog
• Gabi on Twitter site
• Datastore site
• BigTable site
• Firebase Realtime Database site
• Memorystore site
• Cloud Spanner site
• GCP Podcast Episode 248: Cloud Spanner Revisited with Dilraj Kaur and Christoph Bussler podcast
• All you need to know about Firestore: A cheatsheet blog

What’s something cool you’re working on?

Brian has been working on sharing a persistent disk between Google Compute Engine VMs.

• Cloud Storage site
• Cloud Filestore site
• Cloud SQL site