Unlearning Relational DB

Some of my first university programming was writing CICS COBOL transactions against IBM’s DB2 relational database. My commercial work after uni was mostly written in Clipper which was a sort of compiled version of dBase and used the same data file format. The minimal web work I did in the before times relied on MySQL .

All of which is to say, I’m very comfortable designing relational database schema, and I understand what’s going on at the disk level when they are being accessed and written to.

Firebase

In the category of “getting ahead of myself”, my list of potential future apps to develop includes an entry for a simple accounting system. I guess transactions could live in SQLite, on iCloud for sharing between Mac and mobile devices. Nevertheless, while noodling about it, I thought I should think about it being fully online, and I’d heard Google’s Firebase (probably referring for specifically to Firestore ) mentioned in several iOS developer podcasts and thought I should take a look.