The Google-owned company has announced Cloud Firestore, which is seeking to be a ‘new document database for apps’, particularly for realtime database developers.

Objects, collections and documents

It’s described as a fully-managed NoSQL document database for mobile and web app development. Features include:

• Documents and collections with powerful querying
• iOS, Android, and Web SDKs with offline data access
• Real-time data synchronization
• Automatic, multi-region data replication with strong consistency
• Support for Node, Python, Go, and Java server SDKs

Specifically, (in Google’s words) it:

• Synchronizes data between devices in real-time
• Uses collections and documents to structure and query data
• Enables offline data access via an on-device database
• Enables serverless development
• Integrates with the rest of the Firebase platform

Another realtime database

Firebase already has a realtime database offering – the Firebase Realtime Database, funnily enough – and you can see an in-depth comparison between the two databases online.

Todd Kerpelman, Google’s Developer Advocate, writes:

While the Firebase Realtime Database is basically a giant JSON tree where anything goes and lawlessness rules the land1, Cloud Firestore is more structured. Cloud Firestore is a document-model database, which means that all of your data is stored in objects called documents that consist of key-value pairs — and these values can contain any number of things, from strings to floats to binary data to JSON-y looking objects the team likes to call maps. These documents, in turn, are grouped into collections.

All queries are shallow, meaning that you can simply fetch a document without having to fetch all of the data contained in any of the linked subcollections. This means you can store your data hierarchically in a way that makes sense logically without worrying about downloading tons of unnecessary data.

For more details, see the documentation, pricing, code samples, and performance limitations during beta.

Cloud Firestore is entering its public beta now, if you are interested in finding out more.