Questions about Firebase's service.

[Christian Tucker]

Hello everyone, I'm an application developer and up until recently I've been creating my own back-end servers using NodeJS, Express, MongoDB and a handful of additional modules. I was curious about a few things when looking into Firebase and figured this was a good place to ask.

1: How are the connections managed? Does FireBase utilize websockets, or HTTP requests? 

2: What database storage engine does FireBase use on the back-end? 

3: I'm aware that FireBase uses NoSQL data storage, does this mean that optimizations done with normal NoSQL databases should be done here? For example:

    { 

         first_name: "Christian",

         last_name: "Tucker",

         email_address: "xxxxxxx...@xxxxx.xxx"

    }

 

Versus:

    { 

         f: "Christian",

         l: "Tucker",

         e: "xxxxxxx...@xxxxx.xxx"

    }

These documents have less to search for when doing string comparisons which results in faster query times and less data stored in the database. (MongoDB)

[Michael Lehenbauer]

Hey Christian,

1. The Firebase Database primarily uses WebSockets but has a JSONP long-polling fallback in the web SDK.

2. The backend is proprietary.  Since our data structure (a JSON-based tree) is pretty unique, it's pretty custom.

3. The optimization you mention probably does apply (it may slightly improve query times and will also slightly reduce bandwidth for data transfer), but in general I wouldn't consider the benefits to outweigh the readability / maintainability cost.

Hope this helps,

-Michael

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