I have an existing Google Cloud project which uses Datastore. I'm excited by Firestore and would like to switch. According to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYG-BgXoJFQ it is recommended to create a new project.
Is it possible to just nuke Datastore somehow (I don't care about the data) and start from scratch with Firestore?
If not, what are the implications of creating a new project?
It is not possible to switch from Datastore to Firestore within the same project as yet, but you may operate Firestore in Datastore mode. By creating a Cloud Firestore database in Datastore mode, you can access Cloud Firestore's improved storage layer while keeping Cloud Datastore system behavior. You may find more information of relevance by reading the "Automatic Upgrade to Cloud Firestore" documentation page.
If there is no data written to Cloud datastore, it's possible to convert from datastore to firestore with the following steps. I tried on 2 projects and each project took 3 minutes. The user should be the project owner to attempt:
I have another project that has little datastore entities. I deleted them and executed the steps, but received the following error. While disabling datastore API, I read Disable Cloud Datastore API? If any resources were created by Cloud Datastore API, they may be deleted soon after Cloud Datastore API is disabled. All code that uses this project's credentials to call Cloud Datastore API will fail.
ERROR: (gcloud.firestore.databases.create) Error Response: [9] The "database_type" field cannot be modified for this application. Note: If data has already been written for this application, then the "database_type" may not be modified.
The solution is to contact Google cloud support to convert from Datastore to Firestore. You need to make sure no entities exist and nothing is creating any entities.
In the case where no Datastore entities have been written, the operation should succeed:
Success! Selected Google Cloud Firestore Native database for $PROJECT_ID
