Storing many small files in Cloud Firestore?

Question

I have an application where thousands of small files are stored in Google Cloud Storage, and I have a million small records of metadata in Firebase Realtime Database.

When I switch database to Cloud Firestore beta in the Firebase Console, it warns me that the Cloud Storage will be disabled: "Enabling Cloud Firestore Beta will preclude you from using Cloud Datastore with this project, notably from the associated App Engine app."

So I would have to move the files to Cloud Firestore? I don't see any examples from Google on storing files in Cloud Firestore? Should they then be stored as Base64 string or what?

Answer 1

Cloud Storage != Cloud Datastore

Cloud Datastore is a NoSQL database that has been around for quite a while and is very similar to Firestore in many regards. The reason for them not being available in parallel might be that they are actually using the same backend in some way.

Cloud Storage is for storing arbitrary files and isn't affected by you using Firestore at all.