FRANK VAN PUFFELEN: Welcome to Firebase Release Notes
for February, where we cover recent big and small releases
from Firebase.
Now, we have six releases to cover today, so let's
dig in right away.
There's a new tool for Firestore called the Key Visualizer.
It helps you visualize the database performance
in your project.
After you enable the tool in the Cloud Console,
you can let it analyze your Firestore usage
for a two-hour period, and it then
generates a heat map that shows excess patterns or performance
metrics over that time.
This heat map, for example, represents an effective use
of Firestore.
It shows a fine-grained mix of dark and bright colors,
and that means that the reads and writes
are evenly distributed throughout your database.
But a heat map like this one, with a single bright diagonal
line, indicates that a database probably uses sequential keys.
And such strictly increasing or decreasing keys
are an anti pattern in Firestore,
because they can create read or write hotspots.
The Key Visualizer makes it easy to see these patterns
in your Firestore usage.
So check the link that I included below
for more information.
As you might know, our libraries for Flutter
nowadays come with a pre-built user interface
for authentication, giving you the fastest way to add sign-in
to your Flutter app.
This UI is now available in three additional languages--
Portuguese, Italian, and Dutch.
This brings the total number of languages to eight.
Our Flutter libraries now also sets the dSYM format
for Crashlytic podspecs so that you
get more readable stack traces and crash
reports from your iOS users.
Be sure to upgrade to the latest release with the link below.
We just released an emergency security update for Version 8
of our JavaScript SDK.
This release upgrades the note fetch
dependency to address security issue CVE20220235.
And this is also a good reminder that the v8 SDK is updated only
for such emergency security fixes,
and it does not benefit from any other updates.
So whenever possible, upgrade to the latest v9 version
of the SDK by following this upgrade guide.
When writing Cloud Functions in Firebase,
you often rely on values that are defined externally
to alter how your code executes.
Well, you can now configure those values through
environment variables that are loaded from .env files.
And this means that you can now manage functions configuration,
including for the emulators, in files that you
can check into source control.
In addition, you can store sensitive configuration
information, like API keys, in Cloud Secrets Manager,
and those values are encrypted and only
available to the specific functions that use them.
In your code, you can then access all of these values
like any other environment variables
that you might have in your process.env.
And with these changes, you can now also maintain
different configuration files for different environments,
like for the dev project versus your production project.
The Firebase CLI will switch between them automatically when
you start the emulators or run Firebase Deploy.
We just added new pages to our documentation
that show health metrics for our SDKs.
These new graphs show how the binary size of each SDK
has changed over time, specifically for the iOS
Android and JavaScript SDKs.
We intend to add the same information
for more of our SDKs, as well as other helpful metrics.
Now, keep in mind that these sizes
are not necessarily how much bigger your app will
be when you add the Firebase feature,
but only show how the SDK size has changed over time.
And finally, when you set up your Firebase project
to export data from Cloud Messaging, Performance
Monitoring, or Predictions, you can now
select a BigQuery region outside of the US,
just as you could already do for exported analytics data.
Now, this is a long-requested feature
from our EMEA and other non-US users,
as it allows you to meet data residency
requirements by analyzing the data in your own region.
Those were all the updates we have time for today.
If you like this video, be sure to give it a thumbs
up and subscribe to the channel below.
My name is Frank, or Puf, and I'll
see you on a future episode of Firebase Release Notes.