The top 10 things to know about Firestore when choosing a database for your app

Something you might have noticed about database products is that there’s no “one-size-fits-all” product that meets all the needs of all possible project requirements. Each product is built for a specific realm of use cases, each very different from each other. For example:

• SQLite is a small relational database, and meant to be embedded for use on devices (it’s the built-in choice for the Android platform).
• Redis is an in-memory database, primarily representing key/value pairs, which is great for hosting large, fast caches.
• Neo4j is a graph database which excels at querying complex data structures by traversing the nodes of a graph the expresses relationships between entities.

These are each very popular, and also very specialized, database products intended to solve different types of problems with software development. They also have limitations — SQLite doesn’t scale in the cloud, and Redis doesn’t have flexible querying. So how do you decide which database to choose? It’s about picking the right tool for the job. Choosing a database that doesn’t suit the needs of your project can cause problems, but you might not realize it until well after you’ve committed to the database.