Should I build a firebase integration?

I've used Firebase for many projects (recent www.ayrshare.com ) and think retrieving data from Firestore is straight forward. It is just a NoSQL DB.

Your example of getting users, typically you create a "users" collection and add users at registration. If so you can do (from the server-side, client code a bit different):

admin.firestore().collection("users").get().then(snapshot => {...});

From there use one of the dozens of packages to convert JSON to CSV.

Here is an example from the Firebase team of syncing with Google Sheets.
https://github.com/firebase/functions-samples/tree/master/google-sheet-sync

Super helpful thread, thank you!

I've seen several startups have issues wanting to export data from firebase in the last 6 months. It's possible but not simple. I believe there's potential here.

You could just run some code periodically that reads from the database and writes to a Google Sheets. I've done it for reports and such, it's super easy.

It's true that the querying capabilities of Firebase are shit, but you can download the data to your code and do whatever it is you need to do there before writing to Google Sheets.

I'v heard, getting data from firebase is difficult.

Depends on what you mean by this. I assume you might want to build a little backend interface where you can retrieve some stats and trigger an export if need to.

For example, if you want to see how many users have registered, it can be difficult to go to firestore and run a query and parse json to CSV for analysis.

You can't access auth info directly, you'll have to save this in a Firestore document. You have to be aware that you're on a nosql db here and data modelling looks a bit different. They are optimized for reads, not queries. It's really important to design your structure accordingly, it's not a relational db, otherwise you will fight with the technology.

But I don't see a problem with running a cloud function on a cron job to retrieve a Firestore document, parse it to CSV and push the content out as an email via Sendgrid or so. It's actually pretty easy.

I do not think getting user stats from firebase is hard if you are using their admin SDK: https://firebase.google.com/docs/auth/admin/manage-users#bulk_retrieve_user_data