Firebase Data Connect

Pricing

Firebase Data Connect consists of two billable components, the Data Connect service itself, and the Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL instance that contains your project data.

If you accept the default configuration when you provision a Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL instance, you will be qualified for a 3 month free trial.

• 5 free trials are available per billing account.
• 1 free trial Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL instance per project, although you can have multiple non-free instances within that project.
• There is no cost for the Data Connect service until the product enters public preview.
• There is no cost for the default configuration of your Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL instance: 1 vCPU, 10 GB of storage, 628.74 MB of memory.

During the free trial, you can add computing resources to your Cloud SQL instance, set up a private IP for your instance, and create a read replica for your instance, at which point you will be billed according to Cloud SQL pricing.

Using Data Connect with Vertex AI will incur standard usage charges from Vertex AI for embedding generation.

Key capabilities

How does it work?

The top-level resource for Firebase Data Connect is a service, which represents a managed GraphQL API that can be defined by developers and called by end users. Your schema is the app data model for a service, represented primarily as a collection of GraphQL source files, as well as specific configuration for attached datasources (such as Cloud SQL instances). There can be only one schema per service. Finally, your connectors are collections of queries and mutations that have been defined to operate against a service's schema. There can be many connectors per service (for instance if you have a "rider" app and a "driver" app for your rideshare company).

Your Data Connect schema maps explicitly to a specific underlying PostgreSQL database schema. Data Connect includes tooling to automatically generate the SQL DDL needed to perform schema migrations based on changes to the app schema. Based on your app schema, Data Connect automatically generates additional GraphQL schema to query and manipulate the data model.

Once your app schema is defined, you can write predefined queries and mutations that are executed to read and write data in the application. Data Connect queries and mutations are not submitted by client code and executed on the server. Instead, when deployed, these Data Connect operations are stored on the server, like Cloud Functions. This simplifies code management, and development of your client code. In privileged environments, like the Firebase console and using our Firebase VS Code extension, you can execute ad hoc operations with appropriate Google IAM credentials for administrative operations.

For client code, each supported platform has a core SDK that handles connecting to the backend, issuing requests, and processing responses. These SDKs are not schema-aware and must be supplied with operation names and variables as unstructured data. Each supported platform also has a generated SDK. As you define your data model and operations, tooling on your machine will automatically generate strongly-typed SDKs specific to the application. These SDKs will "wrap" the core SDKs for type safety, ergonomics, and other features such as data validation and more down the road.

Implementation path

Next steps

• If you'd like to see the Firebase Data Connect development flow in action, read through the Get started guide.