Google has launched a NoSQL document database as part of its Firebase platform for app developers.

Firestore is fully managed and gives developers a way to store, synchronize, and query data for their mobile apps, with offline support. The new service was designed to make it easier to deal with complex queries, and to remove the limit of 100,000 concurrently connected devices in Google's Realtime Database service. 

Firestore is designed to make it easy to synch data to the cloud, and to make it easy for developers to get started because of the client libraries. The service comes with iOS, Android, and Web SDKs with offline data access, as well as Node, Python, Go, and Java server SDKs. You get real-time data synchronization, and automatic, multi-region data replication with strong consistency.

The Android, iOS, and Javascript SDKs sync your app data "almost instantly", according to the developers, making it wasy to sync data across devices. While the real-time support is one key element, Firestore also lets your apps run databases in an offline mode, meaning users can get at their app data when they're not connected to the Internet or lose their connection, then sync to the cloud when a network connection is available. This is possible because Firestore has an on-device mobile database.

The Firebase division of Google Cloud, and more importantly the Realtime Database, was acquired by Google when they took over Firebase in 2014, and Firestore builds on the strengths of Realtime Database, including the offline access. Development work will continue on Realtime Database going forward.

Firestore  uses collections and documents for the database structure and for querying data. You can carry out serverless development, and the client-side SDKs take care of the authentication and networking code. Security is also handled on the server with a set of security rules covering aspects such as which users can access which documents. You can use validation logic on the your data as well.

The current set of server-side SDKs cover Java, Go, Python, and Node.js. The developers say more languages are coming in the future.

Cloud Firestore is now a public beta. 

More Information

Firestore Site

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