I need best practice tips to enhance the performance of my noSQL database (hosted on Firebase). Moreover, I need tips on how to structure the nodes.
The database stores product information, with three main properties:
$productId
/date
/category
/subcategory
On my website, I have three views:
- retrieve the last 4 products (orderBy date)
- retrieve last 4 products (by date) of category X
- retrieve last 4 products (by date) of category X and subcategory Y.
Note that I also have a node product_images, which have subnodes matching the productIDs. So constructing the databas as follows:
$categoryId
$subCategoryId
$productId
will not work as I need to know beforehand the $categoryId and $subCatrgoryId before I can match it with $productId. It would also make it difficult to retrieve the last 4 products.
How would I construct my noSQL database in an efficient way, and how would I retrieve the products with Firebase filtering it out with multiple restrictions?
I know that in Firebase you can use orderByChild and equalTo, but this only works on one restriction, whereas I have to deal with one to three.
Since Firebase only can filter on one property, you'll have to combine the values you want to filter on into a single property. Since you have multiple filtering needs, you might need such a property for each filtering use-case.
It seems that this will be possible for you if you combine <category>_<date>
into a single property, which we'll call multi-prop
. We'll also combine <category>_<subcategory>_<date>
into a property called megaprop
:
$productId
/date
/category
/subcategory
/multiprop
/megaprop
Some sample data:
id_cc_1234
date: 20151031
category: candy
subcategory: halloween
multiprop: candy_20151031
megaprop: candy_halloween_20151031
id_tg_2345
date: 20151125
category: candy
subcategory: thanksgiving
multiprop: candy_20151125
megaprop: candy_thanksgiving_20151125
id_tg_3456
date: 20151125
category: food
subcategory: thanksgiving
multiprop: food_20151125
megaprop: food_thanksgiving_20151125
id_sk_4567
date: 20151205
category: candy
subcategory: sinterklaas
multiprop: candy_20151205
megaprop: candy_sinterklaas_20151205
id_sc_5678
date: 20151225
category: candy
subcategory: christmas
multiprop: candy_20151225
megaprop: candy_christmas_20151225
Now your queries turn into:
retrieve the last 4 products
ref.orderByChild('date').limitToLast(4);
retrieve last 4 products of category X
ref.orderByChild('multiprop').startAt('candy').endAt('candy_~').limitToLast(4);
retrieve last 4 products of category X and subcategory Y.
ref.orderByChild('megaprop').startAt('candy_christmas').endAt('candy_christmas_~').limitToLast(4);
Also see: http://jsbin.com/piluzo/edit?js,console for a working version.