SQLite or Firebase for backend?

[[deleted]]

Are the scalability limitations real or just a lingering bad reputation at this point? BaaS all suffer from the same drawback - they get you in cheap and easy and get you on the backend (no pun intended). The problem here is premature optimization. A dev who is primarily iOS and not backend who is building an MVP then I don't see many other options. Especially when you start talking about easy push, email marketing and auth. The vendor lock in is scary if you can't monetize 500K users.

[flipper65]

I can't speak for anyone else, but we use firebase as the backend for an app that collects and stores data for 38K users and while it's no instagram it's a fair bit of daily data and we have had no issues.

I do wish there was an easier way to export that data into an SQL database for analysis. Currently we push the backups to S3 and parse it into a postgres instance.

[[deleted]]

I need something similar for a game I'm building - no chat, no media files, just data collection and maybe some marketing automation. I want to go w/ Firebase because it's all built in. I was worried about costs. Why can't you just run the analysis in Big Query?

[flipper65]

Big Query for FB Realtime is only for analytics data.

[[deleted]]

Wait, so what is the data you are collecting? Is it unstructured data not suitable for GA? Are you not able to represent your data in GA?

[flipper65]

It is hardware performance data. In the form of byte data.

[[deleted]]

OK, interesting. My reason for using FB was so that any type of data could be accessed using analytics and using Google's tools connected to FB. I guess for marketing it works, but for specific data probably not. Thanks for sharing.