title: Saving App Statistic Data in firestore and export to Bigquery or save directly Bigquery?
body: <p>I have the following question, where I could not find any answer in documentation or forums.
  I am product manager, know some programming, quite new to google cloud, firebase, firestore etc and needs to understand options.</p>
  <p><strong>Starting Situation</strong></p>
  <p>We have an App, written in flutter/dart, using firestore as database. When the user uses the app, we generate some statistics data, which is used to calculate medals, badges etc. This is not the typical analytics data, it is specific business data and when the user e.g. works 30 minutes with the app it could create 30 new records.
  For now we store this in firestore. We need the data for 2 things
  a) data is used to calculate medals, badges inside the app and show the user his statistics
  b) We need the aggregated data to calculate some statistics as well.</p>
  <p><strong>The problem</strong></p>
  <p>Firestore is inconvenient to do any analytics or queries. As a product manager I can easily query e.g. a MySQL DB or use a tool for statistics, but not with firestore. For now we wrote a query which retruns a JSON file, however we need a more professional solution. Doing some research we found two options:</p>
  <ul>
  <li>Export data to BigQuery automatically and do reports there</li>
  <li>Save data from the app directly in BigQuery</li>
  </ul>
  <p>Unclear to us are also costs calculations. I read that exporting to BigQuery could be expensive, but costs calcluations are somehow not easily to understand and estimate in the google cloud.</p>
  <p>Do you have any recommendation what is the best way to solve our problem?</p>