Unveiling Firestore Pipeline operations – Firestore's powerful new query engine

Summary

January 15, 2026 Today, in partnership with Google Cloud, we’re unveiling a significant evolution for Firestore that gives you a completely reimagined query engine designed for maximum expressiveness and power. Along with Firestore’s new Pipeline operations, this advanced query engine features over a hundred new query capabilities driven by the latest advancements within the Firestore Enterprise edition. Now you can build even more complex and efficient applications while still getting the real-time sync, offline caching, and AI-powered coding help you love. With a new query engine comes new querying capabilities To introduce Pipeline operations, we overhauled Firestore Enterprise’s query engine to give you more queryability and flexibility, something you’ve long requested. This new query engine brings us to feature parity with other major NoSQL databases and also allows us to add more rich query features. Starting today, you can chain together multiple stages within a query for things like arbitrary aggregations, map operations, and string matching using regular expressions. You can run queries with indexes being optional, giving you full control over when you want to create indexes to improve query performance. To give you an idea of what’s now possible, here’s an example: Note: This example assumes you’re familiar with Firestore’s data model and query methods. Suppose you have an app for sharing food recipes, and you allow user-defined tags on recipes. You might represent a recipe as a document with some fields for essential data like the recipe text itself. Since a tag can be represented with just a string, you could add tags directly to the recipe document as an array of strings: { title: "My recipe", instructions: "Cook the ingredients", authorId: "SomeAuthorID", tags: ["easy", "high protein", "low carb"], ... } If you’re familiar with Firestore, you know how to write a query to search for all recipes that contain a given tag. But what if you want to present a...