Cloud Firestore
Cloud Firestore is a managed, highly scalable, NoSQL database service. Cloud Firestore automatically handles sharding and replication, providing you with a highly available and durable database that scales automatically to handle your applications' load.
Cloud Firestore has two modes - Datastore Mode, and Native Mode. While both modes are NoSQL databases, there are a lot of difference between them, primarily:
Native Mode is a real-time database, meaning you can listen to updates in real-time, and the data model is composed of Document and Collection of documents..
Datastore mode does not have the real-time capability, and the data model is composed of Entity and organized in Kind of entities.
Read Choosing between Native mode and Datastore mode for more information.
For traditional backend applications where real-time data updates is not needed, the Datastore mode is simple to use. For backend applications that wants to adopt reactive programming model, then the Native mode is better suited.
A single Google Cloud Project can only choose one of the modes. Once the mode chosen, you cannot change the mode. I.e., if you created a project that chose to use the Native mode, then the same project can no longer use the Datastore mode.
Learn how to use each of the mode in the following pages.
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