title: Firebase Realtime Database Profiler $wildcard
body: <p>I ran the database profiler recently for about 50 minutes, where about 200k operations were performed. I was most interested in bandwidth to keep an eye on costs. However, when stopping the profiler, I had difficulty understanding the bandwidth report. Here it is:</p>
  <pre><code>┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┬───────────┬────────┬─────────────────────┐
  │ Path                                                     │ Total     │ Count  │ Average             │
  ├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────┼────────┼─────────────────────┤
  │ /event/$wildcard/$wildcard/$wildcard                     │ 267.76 MB │ 49,171 │ 5.45 kB             │
  ├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────┼────────┼─────────────────────┤
  │ /event/$wildcard/$wildcard                               │ 75.85 MB  │ 9,833  │ 7.71 kB             │
  ├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────┼────────┼─────────────────────┤
  │ /event/$wildcard/$wildcard/$wildcard/$wildcard/$wildcard │ 1.50 MB   │ 45,513 │ 32.96106606903522 B │
  ├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────┼────────┼─────────────────────┤
  │ /event/$wildcard/$wildcard/$wildcard/$wildcard           │ 1.38 MB   │ 14,133 │ 97.86648270006368 B │
  ├──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┼───────────┼────────┼─────────────────────┤
  │ /                                                        │ 529.45 kB │ 33     │ 16.04 kB            │
  └──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┴───────────┴────────┴─────────────────────┘
  </code></pre>
  <p>I understand this about the <code>$wildcard</code>:</p>
  <blockquote>
  <p>&quot;Path: The path in your database where the operations occurred. If there are more than 25 child nodes, the profiler tool collapses these into a parent path and adds a $wildcard marker. You might see your database's root directory in the report, represented by a forward slash /.&quot;</p>
  </blockquote>
  <p>Looking at the biggest bandwidth consumer, <code>/event/$wildcard/$wildcard/$wildcard </code>, I do not know what to make of it. Those wildcards could be anything. Is there a way to interpret it that I am missing?</p>