Google LLC has finally made its Cloud Firestore database for mobile, web and “internet of things” applications generally available, more than a year after it was launched in beta.

Cloud Firestore is a serverless, NoSQL database that’s designed to handle unstructured data that doesn’t hew to conventional data models and thus typically isn’t a good fit for a mainstream relational database.

The offering integrates with Google Cloud Platform and Firebase, which is Google’s mobile development platform, and provides several important features for mobile app developers. For example, it can synchronize data between devices in real time.

It also uses concepts called collections and documents to structure and query data, allowing queries to scale up far more than is possible with regular NoSQL databases. And among other things, it allows apps to work offline with a database on the mobile device so apps can work even when connectivity is lost.

“Cloud Firestore does more than just core database tasks,” Google Cloud Vice President of Engineering Amit Ganesh and Product Manager Dan McGrath wrote in a blog post today. “It’s designed to be a complete data backend that handles security and authorization, infrastructure, edge data storage, and synchronization.”

Cloud Firestore also helps accelerate and simplify the building of serverless applications, allowing data to be exported to Google’s BigQuery service for advanced analytics and machine learning purposes, Ganesh and McGrath said. The database has been available in beta test mode since October 2017 and has surged in popularity since that initial launch, with more than a million instances of the database up and running.

Customers include Telegraph Media Group Limited, which runs British newspaper the Daily Telegraph and uses Cloud Firestore to help readers more easily discover and engage with relevant content. Athlete testing technology company Hawkin Dynamics Inc. also uses it to power devices that measure and track athletes’ performances.

Now that Cloud Firestore has hit general availability, Google is making it available in 10 more regions, up from just three. The company is also cutting the cost of the service, with prices for regional instances being reduced by up to 50 percent in some areas.

“NoSQL databases are popular for building next generation apps, both for the enterprise and with mobile use cases,” said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc. “Enterprises also need these cloud database to be available in many regions, so it’s good to see the GA of Firestore in ten new locations. The other key new capability enterprises will welcome is the new SLA commitment, which is critical for the uptime of next generation applications.”

There’s also a new integration with Stackdriver, which is Google’s cloud computing systems management service that offers performance and diagnostics data to public cloud users. The integration, currently in beta, means that Cloud Firestore users can monitor read, write and delete operations in “near real-time,” Google said.

Image: Google