CODEWITHSUNDEEP
firebasegoogle-cloud-firestoregoogle-cloud-datastore
Anthony Bobenrieth
Anthony Bobenrieth

Reputation: 2884

Firestore wont let me specify a numeric document id? How is it working?

I have been told that (at least on relational database) index types were important when it comes to compare two values, which is a pretty basic operation executed multiple times for every search.

So i got recomended to store my indexes as numerics (32bits for long) rather than string (8bits/char) considering the following

key:"1234567890" => 80bits ASCII-string
key: 1234567890   => 32bits uLong
generated:"hgYTTd4p63pdTtOR1wFG" => 160bits

As far as i m looking, firestore doesnt allow to specify key type for the document (throwing a "path have to be string" error) as well as size-type, but the default id generator is an optimized string using both upper and lower case ASCII

My question: Is index types that worthless now? How is it working? Can i safely turn any number based key into a string without slowing anything, or do i rather sur the default id generator to get the shortest key?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1835

Answers (2)

RobinBobin
RobinBobin

Reputation: 565

This page of the docs says

The size of a document ID is either the string size for a string ID or 8 bytes for an integer ID. Note: The Cloud Firestore client libraries always use string document IDs.

But I don't know how to use integer IDs. I'm using a client library.

Upvotes: 1

Doug Stevenson
Doug Stevenson

Reputation: 317487

All document IDs in Firestore are strings, and that can't be changed. The requirements for document IDs are listed in the documentation (it's a maximum of 1500 bytes).

At the scale the Firebase operates at, using an integer wouldn't even likely actually provide much of a real performance boost. When there are billions of documents in a collection, Firstore has bigger problems to deal with than optimizing a few bytes in a document ID. It's more important actually to ensure that it has a working space of IDs that can be virtually guaranteed to store a randomly generated ID without colliding with other documents that might exist.

Upvotes: 2

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