Best way to change region of Realtime Database?

[Andreas B]

I have an Android app that I want to publish early next year. Use of this app will be restricted to Europe - and while there's no personal information stored yet, it seems to be a good idea to future-proof this by moving the RTDB to a european location now rather than later, after release and with much more data to move.

The Firebase project for this is on a Spark plan right now, which means that I can't simply create an additional database in the same project.

There's an option to "disable database", so I wonder if it would be a viable way to:

1. export all data

2. delete all data

3. disable the current DB

4. create a new DB

5. import data

Will I be able to select a database region by doing so? Would there be any delay between deleting the current DB and being able to create a new one? If so, are we talking about days, weeks, months?

If this is not an option, what would be? Creating a new project and moving my app to that?

Thanks in advance for any ideas!

[Sam Stern]

Hi Andreas,

This is a good question and I'm actually not quite sure, I think the best thing for you to do is to create a new project on the Spark plan and just try it out!  Create a database in the US region, delete it, and see if you're allowed to create a new database in the EU region.

Or maybe someone else on this mailing list will chime in with an authoritative answer :-)

- Sam

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[Andreas B]

> I think the best thing for you to do is to create a new project on the Spark plan and just try it out! 

It can be so simple sometimes... ;)

So, regarding my question about disabling the old DB, then creating a new one - that doesn't seem to work. After disabling, there's just a button to "Enable" the same DB again. Creating a new one from scratch doesn't seem to be an option here.

However, when I did this test (caveat: on an already existing test project that didn't use RTDB before), I was not asked to choose a region while creating the DB for the first time. Did I do anything wrong (perhaps it has to do with this project already existing for a while), or is it expected behaviour that creating a DB from the console always creates it in us-central1 without user choice? If so, what else would I need to do to create a DB in europe-west1?

[Andreas B]

Follow-up: Selecting a database location is possible in a new project. For what it's worth, I selected a Default GCP resource location ("eur3") in the project settings before creating a Realtime Database instance.

[Sam Stern]

Hi Andreas,

Thanks for testing that out!  I'm not sure what's going on in that second question. I just created a brand new project and when I went to initialize Realtime Database for the first time it asked me to choose a location:

I even went and created a Cloud Firestore instance in us-central and then went back to the RTDB flow and it still offered me both choices, which shows that the RTDB location does not depend on the overall Project location.

- Sam

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[Andreas B]

Thanks Sam,

selecting a DB location did indeed work in a new project. I was a bit afraid of moving the actual app to that new project, but that too worked like a charm. Thanks for all of your work! :)