[Firebase founder here]
We'd love to know what limitations you've run into and how we can do better! Send me a tweet: @startupandrew
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Well I love Firebase, but to put it naively, Firebase needs more advanced queries. Even more than usual because it is running 'far' from my backend, so queries from backend are expensive. For example, if there was a way to selectively bring back children of an object etc. I know there are workarounds (and I am doing those) but since Firebase is a DBaaS it needs to account for that when compared to other DBs.
This really seems like a limitation of nosql/mongodb, would it be worthwhile to reconsider sql/nosql trade offs?
Well I would say reconsideration is always right but it's expensive (nosql->sql is big deal) when you are a fast-paced startup and don't want to spend resources on non-critical things. I know it will get critical someday, so we are slowly finding a solution to it.
Schema design allows you to grab stuff you want joined all at the same time (aka the data lives together in a document) in mongodb's model. This obviously has limitations in many to many relationships where the access pattern isn't clear, but often these tradeoffs can work.
Would you like to try out our alternative approach instead at Hasura.io? Parse like API on Postgres - with all SQL queries possible! We'd love to chat if you are still evaluating options @HasuraHQ. We are launching our public beta next week. Here is a short post of our take on the Parse shutdown: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10994104
We hear you! And we're working on it.