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points by tmpz22 2 days ago | 0 comments

This post also begs the question:

Why didnt you simply provision more powerful developer boxes to handle the needs of the Firebase emulator?

If runtime performance is the moat then won’t Google simply improve on these regressions using their decades of cloud database expertise with projects like Google Spanner?

—-

These are hardball questions and I feel a bit bad asking them, but I believe asking hard questions is kinder than blind adulation and support.

[–] nfw2 2 days ago

> then won't Google simply improve on these regressions using their decades of cloud database expertise

The developer experience of trying to emualate firebase locally has always been horrible, going on fifteen years, so I would guess no, they won't because they don't care.

[–] CharlieDigital 1 day ago

Would disagree here given that Firebase is the only one of the three owned platform toolkits (Azure, AWS, GCP) that has a really complete first party emulator suite.

[–] nfw2 1 day ago

I would agree that Firebase is better now than most vendor-locked dbs which often don't have an emulator at all.

But local developer experience is still not good compared to Postgres or Mongo.

[–] CharlieDigital 1 day ago

That feels like it's more a function of the lack of a query UI whereas Pg and Mongo have a lot of options.

I used Firefoo for a while and Google should just buy that product and ship it with Firebase. Otherwise, I have no issues with local Firestore emulation; everything works as I expected it with a few edge cases.

[–] miserve 1 day ago

Have you ever come across Fuego or had a chance to try it? It supports complex Firestore queries, including Firestore Enterprise pipeline queries and Point-in-Time Recovery (PITR).

[–] sanjevirau 2 days ago

Hi there, don't feel bad asking these questions. In fact, i had this questions in mind too while this project was started.

Firstly, we already running of powerful dev boxes but still hitting out of memory issues in the official local emulators. These stronger machines doesn't remove Java or replaces the old console UI or able to loads tons of data.

Google should fix it and it's expected, but for some reason, they haven't really prioritized local tools for local devs. In other ways of saying, some one had to take this in hand and try it out, and well we did :)

[–] tmpz22 1 day ago

Appreciate the reply, further I'd add that: Even if both my proffered solutions came to pass and 1) many paid the compute prices for bigger dev boxes and 2) Google did overhaul the emulator, then your solution could still be a viable business if it provided sufficient value for Firebase users in being more responsive and tailored to their needs - especially given big companies like Google are notorious for abandoning even wealthy client demographics.