By practical, I mean collections with > 1000 documents. I am asking this question sincerely.
I am having pretty good success with building some tools with Retool and Firestore/Firebase Auth/GCS, however there are limited resources (i.e. documentation) and broken functionality for Firestore.
Pagination for Firestore on Retool is broken/incomplete. It requires workarounds to even get started. The basic startAfter() functionality is only a floating suggestion.
The documentation for working with Firebase/Firestore from Retool doesn't cover pagination with Firestore.
I'm not complaining. I'm just questioning myself whether I should be going down the Firestore/Firebase/GCS route on here if no one else is using it practically.
For instance, if I have 100,000 users I need to create a management tool for, how can I paginate through the collection? If you take the traditional limit()/offset() route, you need to keep in mind that you are still getting charged for the reads before the offset, so reading the last page will require a full 100,000 reads. I know that filtering will help with some of this, but the fact that pagination is not working (without workarounds) makes me think that no one is using the base level functionality of Retool with Firestore (except for some die-hards using workarounds). I'm sure there a lot of people "tinkering" with Firestore and Retool.
If there are any people out there that can share some insight into how they use Retool with Firestore (in a practical application, with large collections), I would love to hear from you.
Retool has been really great to work with. However, I'm feeling frustrated with the dead-ends I'm experiencing in trying to work with large Firestore collections.
