Ask HN: Migrate a large corporate system with strong relations to Firestore?

1 points by Tyler-Durden 8 years ago | 2 comments

So i have been assigned with the task of migrating a large corporate system running in production to Firestore and cloud functions. At the moment the system is a JS framework with thousands and thousands of LOC, and the task of porting that to cloud function without having any data relations seems daunting to me to be honest. Not that it can't be done, but i feel many of the solutions to replace RDBMS seems so hardcoded and hacked to me at this point. Management have proposed it as a fresh start to rewrite the entire current system, after reading a bit about Firestore, and want to get offline data and get the strong authentication scheme from Firebase, but these features could fairly easily be implemented otherwise. So i am hoping someone here has had some experience with migrating large frameworks with strong data relations to Firestore/NoSQL frameworks, and replacing an entire serverside with just cloud functions?

mattbillenstein 8 years ago |

I think your initial instincts that migrating the whole thing to a completely different paradigm for a couple features seems a bit off.

But, build a small prototype of part of it and see how far you get before it pushes back -- that's when you'll really know if it's possible and a good move.

mattbillenstein 8 years ago | |

Also, I will add, re the relational aspect, I did the reverse one time. A company was having awful performance with a non-relational store in a very relational application -- ultimately migrating the backend to a sql database provided a bunch of benefits.