I'd highly recommend people to stay away from Firebase. The querying options are really lacking. You'll likely get much better performance for much cheaper, and easier to develop for with a cheap postgres instance.
I've been surprised over five years of using Firebase how often complex queries weren't necessary, though! I highly recommend using Firebase if you want realtime data synchronization and great client libraries as well as easy auth and some nice integrations with cloud functions and the like.
As a bonus it even has real-time functionality
Combined with graphql-codegen you can essentially generate react hooks from a Postgres schema. It’s awesome - and all typed if you’re using typescript too
That said, bluntly telling people to stay away from Firebase as a whole, isn't really the solution here. There are many products available and they are all quite good. I think that everyone should look at their use cases and make their own call on the matter.
I'm still using the realtime store because I'm also using firebase auth (which is excellent). I can update a timestamp for the user in the realtime store and all my clients automatically get triggered. Firebase hosting and firebase functions are pretty nice as well, with very little vendor lockin.
I think these play well to Firebase's strength. In a previous life I built an app that sucks in a lot of data exhaust and then visualizes it... IMO Firebase wouldn't have worked well for that.
Incidentally, Apollo does for Graphql exactly what this post is all about.
https://github.com/apollographql/apollo-server/tree/master/p...