Firestore: The NoSQL Serverless Database for the Application Developer

Ram Kesavan
David Gay
Daniel Thevessen
Jimit Shah
C. Mohan
2023 IEEE 39th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), pp. 3367-3379

Abstract

The recent years have seen an explosive growth in web and mobile application development. Such applications typically have rapid development cycles, expect mobile-friendly features and serverless characteristics such as rapid deployment (with minimal provisioning) capabilities, scalability to handle workload spikes, and convenient pay-as-you-go billing. Google’s Firestore is a NoSQL serverless database with real-time notification capability, and together with the Firebase ecosystem it greatly simplifies common app development challenges while letting the application developer focus primarily on their business logic and user experience. This paper presents the Firestore architecture, how it satisfies the aforementioned requirements, and how its real-time notification system works in tandem with Firebase client libraries to allow mobile applications to provide a smooth user experience even across network connectivity issues.

Research Areas