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This was a long time coming, so congrats first.

I also recently read this from an experienced Firebase developer: https://medium.freecodecamp.com/firebase-the-great-the-meh-a...

Interestingly, he lists several things that he things Firebase needs in order to be awesome, and server-functions is last on the list:

> 1. Real querying capabilities. Search, joins, the whole enchilada.

> 2. Some sort of references likes MongoDB or RethinkDB.

> 3. Real offline persistence with Javascript.

> 4. Give me moar analytics.

> 5. A cache API.

> 6. Some way of adding server side code without needing to resort to a VPS.

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Well, Cloud Functions for Firebase isn't the only thing we're working on... ;)

We use flashlight[1], an elasticsearch plugin to querying firebase. There is another implementation using cloud functions and Algolia[2].

[1]https://github.com/firebase/flashlight

[2]https://github.com/firebase/functions-samples/tree/master/fu...

The extremely poor JOIN functionality is what turned me away from Firebase a couple of years ago.

I come from 25+ years of SQL, and Firebase was my choice for essentially my first 'real world' NoSQL project. I was enjoying it right up to the bit where I had to extract data from 2, and 3 data tables at the same time in a single query. Couldn't believe how verbose and painful it was and it made me drop NoSQL for a while before more recently going back to it (with RethinkDB).

A lot of the join functionality can now be simulated by using functions to effectively create views or map reduce data to distilled output. We've got a lot more to come on this front. Functions was just first on the list.

Do you think there will ever be some kind of materialized views / declarative data denormalization?

Nr. 3 would be the end for me, I still don't get why they haven't implemented this, it exist for Ios and Android, why not web!!

I understand wanting a native version, but wouldn't it be relatively straightforward to connect to something like PouchDB for web persistence?

Author here. That list wasn't really ordered in any way.

And btw I've removed point 6 from that list.

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