Refresh Firebase data to BigQuery to display in Data Studio

Question

I am researching of a way to regularly sync Firebase data to BigQuery, then display that data to Data Studio. I saw this instruction in the documentation:

https://support.google.com/firebase/answer/6318765?hl=en

According to the above instruction, it says once Firebase is linked to BigQuery, the data from Firebase is being streamed to BigQuery real-time.

Let's say I have initial export of Firebase data to BigQuery (before linking) and I made a Data Studio visualization out of that initial data, we call it Dataset A. Then I started linking Firebase to BigQuery. I want Dataset A to be in sync with Firebase every 3 hours.

Based on the documentation, does this mean I don't have to use some external program to synchronize Firebase data every 3 hours to BigQuery, since it is streaming real-time already? After linking, does the streamed data from Firebase automatically goes to Dataset A?

I am asking because I don't want to break the visualization if the streaming behaves differently than the expected (expected means that Firebase streams to BigQuery's Dataset A consistent with the original schema). Because if it does (break the original dataset or it doesn't stream to the original dataset), I might as well write a program that does the syncing.

Answer 1

Once you link your Firebase project to BigQuery, Firebase will continuously export the data to BigQuery, until you unlink the project. As the documentation says, the data is exported to daily tables, and a single fixed intraday table. There is no way for you to control the schedule of the data export beyond enabling/disabling it.

If you're talking about Analytics data, schema changes to the exported data are very rare. So far there's been a schema change once, and there are currently no plans to make any more schema changes. If a schema change ever were to happen again though, all collaborators on the project will be emailed well in advance of the change.