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Firestore’s Technical Advantages

Tom Larkworthy
3 min readMay 12, 2021

I have read some pretty poor articles bashing Firestore recently. Generally they completely miss the features set or cargo cult Postgres SQL. This article attempt to highlight the features of Firestore that you won’t see with a Postgres solution (note I love Postgres), highlighting several area’s where Firestore is the world #1.

Clientside first

It’s designed for a direct connection to a mobile/webapp. This means it has a number of features that are unmatched in the market.

Latency compensation

Firestore maintains a local cache, so local writes and observable immediately. Greatly simplifying controller design. It even broadcasts writes to adjacent tabs in the browser for 0 latency across browser tabs. You ain’t got time to implement that!

Offline persistence

The cache is backed by persistent storage, so your app works offline without much work. This is a huge feature that is difficult to get right and essential for a good mobile experience.

Authorisation rules

The database has a layer of security rules which are very flexible and can depend on values in the database.

Causal Consistency

Tom Larkworthy
Tom Larkworthy

Written by Tom Larkworthy

Observablehq/Cloud consultant. Developing webcode.run to serverless to Observablehq. Ex-Firebase, Ex-Google Cloud.

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I wasn't aware its backed by cloud spanner. Can you please share more info on this?