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Having run an (internal) app that is deeply integrated with Google Sheets for about a year, I think that Sheets is good and bad. It's _extremely_ powerful for a
by rickcnagy 10y ago
Having run an (internal) app that is deeply integrated with Google Sheets for about a year, I think that Sheets is good and bad. It's _extremely_ powerful for allowing business users to easily get access to and manipulate data manually. Downside is that it really struggles past a few thousand rows when you've got more than 20 or so columns. Definitely good for a quick and dirty way to expose data to internal users, but it essentially can't scale. Engineers need to be ready to move off of it if the system works.
- iamdave 10y agoI've found that it also chokes when you throw Google Apps Scripts at it; or at least it did when I was developing a mail merge app for a Real Estate friend. By "chokes" I mean the application frequently locked up, cells would stop responding and I had to constantly reload the page, in a spreadsheet with only a couple of hundred rows, and maybe 12 columns.
- startupdiscuss 10y agoIf anyone from Google is reading this: please add a database (yes, like a cloud version of MS ACCESS) in the Google Docs/Drive suite. Has anyone looked at "Fusion Tables?" A google search reveals that is what it is supposed to be.
- bognition 10y agoThey already have one its called CloudSQL https://cloud.google.com/sql/ https://cloud.google.com/sql/
- skj 10y agoThat's not part of the drive/docs suite.
- pg_is_a_butt 10y agothere is no more drive/docs suite.... it's all "Google Cloud" now. you're all idiots.
- ghostly_s 10y agoYep, this should be accessible to users. Someone needs to bridge that gap from spreadsheets to real apps. One click to convert your Spreadsheet into a database. Or hell, just silently migrate it when (NUMROWS + NUMCOLUMNS) > BIGNUMBER .
- tomlock 10y agoHonestly, if clippy suggested to excel users something similar, I'd be extremely happy.
- Twirrim 10y agoSomething a la Microsoft Access? (but obviously integrated in their online suite)
- udfalkso 10y agoCheck out airtable.com for something like this. Great product, lots of use cases.
- micah_chatt 10y agoIsn't that what Firebase is for?
- vgt 10y agoSheets integrates with BigQuery! There's also ODBC in AppScript (although I haven't tested it to tell you how well it works). (work on Google Cloud)
- domfletcher 10y agoI had a lot of mileage avoiding row count actually in the sheet buy using an API to retrieve data directly when a user is interested in a particular record. Then the only think you need to keep in the sheet is an index which is lighter because (as far as I can tell) it's cell count that really affects performance.
- audleman 10y agoI had the same experience. I had to write a layer to slice my data up and submit no more than 50 rows, and retry on connection timeouts. Very frustrating, and so weird that a global giant like Google releases an API that's so mediocre.
- vpribish 10y agohear hear! this was my experience too. I was ready to switch to using gsheets as my entire application UI layer when the scaling problems and desyncing started hitting me. still fantastic for quick-and-dirty tools and prototypes though.
- DontGiveTwoFlux 10y agoOne issue I ran into quite a bit was timeouts. I had a spreadsheet with a few hundred rows I was using to create Docs and send emails. I was running from scripts.google.com. Any operation running for longer than about five minutes would time out so I had to batch my work into smaller buckets and hit run a bunch of times.