CODEWITHSUNDEEP
firebasefirebase-realtime-databasegoogle-bigquery
Richeek
Richeek

Reputation: 2220

Create dashboard on Firebase Database for various metrics

I have events in firebase database table where each event has certain fields. One of the field is event_type. What I want to achieve is to be able to visualize in graphical form, how many events of each type comes daily?

How do I do something like that in firebase database?

Q1. Is it possible to directly do this in firebase?

Q2. Do I need to move data to some other datasource (like Big query) and setup dashboard there?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 3128

Answers (1)

Frank van Puffelen
Frank van Puffelen

Reputation: 598797

It is definitely possible to create a dashboard with aggregate data directly on the Firebase Realtime Database. But you'll have to take a different approach than with e.g. BigQuery.

With relational databases, you'll create a dashboard by running aggregation queries. For example to show how many events of each type, you'll run something like SELECT type, COUNT(*) FROM events GROUP BY type.

The Firebase Realtime Database (and most NoSQL databases) don't have such a GROUP BY operation, not a COUNT() method. So that means that you'd have to load all data into your dashboard, and group/count it there, which is quite expensive. That why on NoSQL databases you'll typically keep a running count for each type in the database and update that on every write operation. While this puts an overhead on each write operation, the dashboard itself suddenly becomes very simply when you do this. For an example of a simple counter, see the function-samples repo.

This approach only works if you know up front what counters (and other aggregates) you want to show in the dashboard. If that isn't the case, many developers use the nightly backups from the Realtime Database to ingest the data into another system that lends itself more to exploratory querying, such as BigQuery.

Either approach can work fine. The right approach is a matter of your exact use-case (e.g. do you know the exact data you want in the dashboard, or are you still figuring that out?) and what you're most comfortable with.

Upvotes: 3

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