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11 Comments

Don't sleep on Google Sheets for backend infra!

For analytics on Timestamps usage I log directly into a Google Sheet😂

And this actually works great! Minimal infra, structured, fast (no querying GBs of server logs), and I can manually touch up the data (needed for the user column).

Don't sleep on Google Sheets for backend infra🤪

posted to Icon for group Developers
Developers
on September 3, 2020
  1. 2

    Haha, agreed! I just launched Opsgrid, which uses Google Sheets for free server monitoring data retention. It's stretching things a bit - I can store about a year's worth of per-minute metrics at a width of 10 columns - but so far it's been working fairly well.

  2. 1

    Google Sheets are awesome as an interface. Which is why so many things are poping up around using Google sheets as a core component. Sheets to Site/Api/Ecom page etc etc

  3. 1

    I use Google sheets for a project
    The only complaint I have is that the API sometimes of not reachable

  4. 1

    Does google offer an option to expose sheet data through an api or do you use a third party service specifically for that?

    1. 2

      There’s an Api, and you should be able to find a lib for your language

  5. 1

    I was actually thinking of using Sheets for a small side project! Wanted to modernize this hard-to-navigate directory of real estate tech companies (https://www.cretech.com/directory/company?page=1&sortField=company_name&sortBy=true&companyids=&searchFields=0) by scraping the contents and using Airtable as a simple database for my own directory, would you recommend Sheets instead?

    1. 1

      @AndrewKamphey? Would you recommend Airtable 😜

      1. 1

        I would recommend trying sheets.

    2. 1

      Can't comment on Airtable, but sheets has worked well for me, though I'm not exactly using it as a database. I have heard of others using it as a simple db though (including Patrick Mckenzie).

  6. 1

    Yeah, it's nice for some use cases - but be aware of the limits.

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