Choosing the Right Database for Your Flutter App: Cloud Firestore vs Realtime Database
When it comes to building a scalable and efficient Flutter application, selecting the right database is crucial. Google offers two robust services for maintaining data persistence over time: Cloud Firestore and Firebase Realtime Database. Both databases can cater to your app’s needs, but they have distinct differences that make them suitable for specific application types.
Understanding the Key Differences
Cloud Firestore is a NoSQL document database that simplifies storing, syncing, and querying data for apps on a global scale. It’s ideal for complex querying structures, allowing you to perform more intricate queries compared to Realtime Database. With Cloud Firestore, you can create collections and group data in a structured manner, making it easy to track and update information.
On the other hand, Realtime Database stores data as JSON, enabling access to nodes of the data via a DatabaseReference. While it’s suitable for simple querying structures, it lacks the complexity and flexibility of Cloud Firestore.
Our Example Use Case: A Voting App
To illustrate the differences between Cloud Firestore and Realtime Database, let’s create a voting app that allows registered users to cast votes on a particular topic or decision. We’ll explore how to connect our Flutter app to both databases, highlighting their unique strengths and weaknesses.
Getting Started with Cloud Firestore
To set up our Firebase project, we’ll create a new Flutter application, register our project for an Android device, and configure the Firebase Gradle plugin. We’ll then add the Cloud Firestore plugin to our pubspec.yaml file and create a collection called “Users” to hold user data.
Reading and Writing Data with Cloud Firestore
Using the Cloud Firestore plugin, we’ll read data from our collection and display a list of users in our Flutter app. We’ll also perform a write operation by creating a function that inserts a document into our database.
Moving to Realtime Database
To set up our Realtime Database, we’ll follow a similar process to Cloud Firestore, selecting the Realtime Database option in our Firebase console. We’ll then add the Firebase_database plugin to our pubspec.yaml file and initialize our application.
Reading and Writing Data with Realtime Database
Using the Firebase_database plugin, we’ll read data from our Realtime Database and write new users to our database. We’ll also explore how to perform a live stream write or read whenever we change our database using the FirebaseAnimatedList widget.
Choosing the Right Database for Your Flutter App
When it comes to querying capabilities, Cloud Firestore is the clear winner. Its ability to chain filters and combine filtering and sorting on a property in a single query makes it ideal for complex querying structures. Realtime Database, on the other hand, is limited to filtering or sorting data in a single query on only one property.
If you’re looking for a database with robust querying abilities, Cloud Firestore is the way to go. However, if you need a simple, real-time database solution, Realtime Database might be the better choice.
Happy Coding!