Google Cloud Platform Podcast

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