https://robertharrison.ca/tags/firebase/ Recent content in Firebase on Robert Harrison Hugo en-us Thu, 27 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0800 https://robertharrison.ca/blog/bigquery-firebase-functions-read-data/ Thu, 27 Jan 2022 09:00:00 -0800 https://robertharrison.ca/blog/bigquery-firebase-functions-read-data/ <p>An alternative title to this article could have been, &ldquo;How to Access BigQuery from iOS&rdquo;. I&rsquo;m working on a SwiftUI app that needs to read data from BigQuery. There are several <a href="https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/reference/libraries" class="external-link" target="_blank" rel="noopener">BigQuery API Client Libraries</a>, but none are in Swift or Objective-C. There is a Node.js library. My SwiftUI app happens to use Firebase, which supports hosting Node.js code. So the decision is easy. I&rsquo;ll use Node.js and Firebase.</p> <p><em>A different approach could use the <a href="https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/docs/reference/rest" class="external-link" target="_blank" rel="noopener">BigQuery REST API</a>. There are couple of reasons why I chose to take the Node.js/Firebase Functions approach. (1) using a pre-built library can make development easier/quicker (2) In my use case, I want to do some data processing on the results, which makes sense to do on the backend, before returning to the frontend.</em></p>