Data Dictionary for NoSQL Database

Question

Let say, I'm using Firebase Cloud Firestore, which is a NoSQL database. Example of database content is as follows:

- customers
  - customer_01
    - name: "abc"
    - email: "abc@gmail.com"
  - customer_02
    - name: "bcd"
    - email: "bcd@gmail.com"
- items
  - item_01
    - name: "book"
    - price: 22.50
  - item_02
    - name: "pencil"
    - price: 1.50

How do I create data dictionary for a NoSQL database?

Answer 1

I would say that Data Dictionaries are not something that makes a lot of sense for NoSQL databases. This is because due to the flexibility that is offered, the number of fields may vary from document to document, which makes it difficult to make it "predictable" enough to store it an dictionary.

If you really need it for project or client requirements and you have your data in a predictable enough format you could keep it simple and just do a dictionary using name, type and description of fields, since you can't really limit the size of fields directly unless it's in your code, not the Firestore. You could also describe the lack of more information of the dictionary with an explanation similar to this one.

So, for the data you share, I would do the following: