[thenorthbay]

Interesting. Updating values via incrementing them is a use case I barely had in Firebase. I mostly only dealt with 1-time updates to values, e.g. by the user or scheduled jobs. In which scenario would the current design cause you problems?

[bastawhiz]

Incrementing is only one possible use case. Any time you read data and then write back based on that data, you need to ensure that nobody wrote to the document in the interim. RDBMS do this with transactions.

Consider the case where a user is submitting an e-commerce order. You want to mark their order as processed and submit it for fulfillment. If you read the order to check if it's already submitted, two requests to submit it made at almost the same time (e.g., hitting the button twice) will both read that it's unfulfilled and try to each submit it.

By doing an atomic write you can be sure that at most one request submits the order.

[thenorthbay]

Thank you for the feedback. Seems this is important.

[layer8]

I’m sorry to be this frank, but if you weren’t even aware of the importance of transactional safety for read-modify-write operations, you shouldn’t be in the business of creating such a library and advertising it. This is really basic database stuff, so you are only at the beginning of the learning curve regarding database topics.

[ndbebofienw]

If we allow ignorance to be the gatekeeper of progress, we will stifle the growth of every individual around us.

No one person can know everything. Teaching how to solve these problems will produce better software and better people too.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

[layer8]

I have no issues with the OP having that library as a side project and learning experience. But at their experience level it’s not suitable to be promoted publicly. To be fair, they only asked for opinions on it.

[jstarfish]

If I had a time machine, I'd use it to identify who in my life gave me this same "advice" and gift them a copy of their obituary from the future.

For a commercial product, yours is honest feedback.

But this isn't that. You popped into a literal show-and-tell to heckle some kid proud of his macaroni art. You didn't even critique the product, just insulted its maker. What the hell is wrong with you to think this is appropriate, or even helpful?

[gerad]

It’s possible to use optimistic locking and versioning to ensure that things haven’t changed underneath you unexpectedly.

[winrid]

Honestly, it's weird that you never ran into this. This is a requirement for any data store and I've never not used atomic updates at any company. Most basic example: what if two users load the same object at the same time and you want to increment a "seen" count...?

[thenorthbay]

I guess it was sufficient to not have that kind of accuracy in most of the application to deliver user value. There probably were parts of the application where we used transactions. Could be a cool feature to build for this, though.