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Is the Google Sheets API rate limit open enough for actual production use? I thought it was pretty restrictive, no more than 60 writes per minute, but I'm not sure about the reads restrictions.
Yes. I used Google sheets as a database to build a website and ran into this issue. The worse part is, if you come across the limit there’s not much you can do but wait or rate limit. Another problem I had is an API change one year in. I would not use Google Sheets again. Maybe I’d try Airtable, Notion, or some other similar platform where the API access is more of a priority to the company.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd like to nominate this comment for the HN Hall of Fame
Is there such thing?:)
2 Google Sheets backend stories: - Needed to manage vocab learning content for 60 world languages, mostly being updated by a handful of university students and a bunch of remote volunteers. Google Sheets was our source of truth, with a nightly sync into MariaDB. We even wrote some callable scripts that could detect ambiguities and other common issues. Saved us a ton of tooling effort, and stakeholders found it cool t…
what Figma plug-in?
Funny story. Before pivoting my startup to Loom, we were a user testing company named Opentest. Instead of spinning up a DB and creating a dashboard for my co-founders to look at who requested certain user tests, I just dumped everything into a Google Sheet. It was so good. No downtime. Open access. Only 3 people looking/editing, so no conflict. Didn't have to deal with database upgrades or maintenance. I often think…
Agreed. Google Sheets is a great scrappy option for a startup / small company. I've used it for a lot of system data that needs to be modified by a few people at most. With a little bit of careful code and caching (I like validating and syncing to S3) you can easily use it as a crud frontend for important system data. It also can make great adhoc dashboards - plug into APIs (even private ones if you add in custom Goo…
Is the Google Sheets API rate limit open enough for actual production use? I thought it was pretty restrictive, no more than 60 writes per minute, but I'm not sure about the reads restrictions.
I used Google Sheets as a data source that business people could update, but eventually we moved away from it as we found it unreliable. We would get an occasional error (maybe a 429) even though we were polling the sheet once a minute (we had a few other sheets that polled once every few minutes). This manifested as an issue when doing a deploy but being unable to get critical data. We added retries and stuff like t…
I'm convinced most of the people in this thread haven't tried working much with Google Sheets API at scale. Most of the time it's fine, then it will have days where 30-40% of the calls (as measured by Google Cloud console API monitoring) will throw an internal error which Google advises the option for is to "try again later". Also API calls that take up to 4 minutes (?!) to return (again as measured by their own API monitoring tools in Cloud console).
It's too bad because I otherwise really like this approach.
Based on my experience, you'll get problem when the data is somehow large, and at that point it'll be too hard of a problem to fix / optimize CMIIW. Use it for prototyping and migrate to your own backend, or make a driver compatible with google sheet api, to connect to sql.
First time I’ve seen “correct me if I’m wrong” abbreviated like this, good to know.
Funny story. Before pivoting my startup to Loom, we were a user testing company named Opentest. Instead of spinning up a DB and creating a dashboard for my co-founders to look at who requested certain user tests, I just dumped everything into a Google Sheet. It was so good. No downtime. Open access. Only 3 people looking/editing, so no conflict. Didn't have to deal with database upgrades or maintenance. I often think…
Sounds neat, let me ask permission first before I put company data into Google Sheets.
You don't actaully need any fancy wrapping.. just open https://script.google.com/ you can already access all google's APIs + you will be able to integrate your sheets with your gmail (send email), calendar (you can modify the calendar when the sheet get changes), create pages, allow inputs from form and etc..) The problem with that is the sheet will not have any .. transaction based ops like a real database so for ex…
Every time someone makes a simple solution for a problem on this website someone else points out that a much more complicated option already exists.