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Google announced Firestore, the new document datastore on the block.

I have been developing an application using Google Cloud Datastore for over six months now and after reading the blog, I feel Firestore seems to be a better choice.

The concept of the alternate collection-document-subcollection looks excellent to me because while designing schema for datastore I was aware I will be unable to query nested fields. Now with firestore subcollections, I get full query capabilities which is a game changer for me (I can get maximum data with minimum queries).

As a counter argument, the flowchart suggests me to use datastore because I do not have any mobile clients.

Will it be a good idea to use Firestore just like Datastore ? (I will conveniently ignore the mobile client/realtime updates/syncing features!)

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Cloud Datastore (CD) and Cloud Firestore (CF) are similar, however different in significant ways.

CF is mobile-centric with direct from mobile client functionality with the Firebase SDKs and Rules functionality. CD is server-centric with a wider range of server client libraries, as well as some mature frameworks on App Engine Standard that bundle in memcache functionality.

CF has a newer storage layer that is strongly consistency in the same way as Cloud Spanner, however, it's still in beta without an SLA. CD's storage layer is only strongly consistent within entity-groups and eventually consistent across entity-groups, however, it is GA with a 99.95% SLA for the Multi-Region locations.

CF is only available in the US Multi-Region at this time. CD is available Cloud across a dozen locations including places in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

CF during beta has a guideline limit of 2500 writes/second while we build experience monitoring and tuning the system prior to GA, whereas CD will happily handle >1M writes/second (please reach out to your account rep first though).

CF and CD's set of query capabilities are overlapping but not the same. Overall CD has a broader set of query capabilities we haven't built in CF yet, so you'd have more flexibility in CD.

Overall, I'd consider this list to see if any of the differences make or break what you're trying to build then pick the DB that fits closest to your needs.

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Thank you for the clarification, Dan. I am enticed by Firestore just by the fact that I can query nested objects using the sub-collections. I want to reduce the data redundancy in CD (which was created by the limitation of CD). – Paritosh Walvekar Dec 8 at 20:27

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