31–40 of 77 posts
A spreadsheet is NOT a database! Argh! As a person who gets asked to fix these kinds of projects once they hit a wall (performance/concurrency/etc) and then have to migrate them to a proper DB platform, just stop it! Put it on in a DB up front and save some poor developer their sanity. Please.
Closest any company has come to a decent web version of Access is Intuit Quickbase. But it is priced for enterprise and not hobbiest. Lacks full SQL but can do some pretty amazing things. Also has reasonable REST-like API. I built a PoC data backend for an iPhone app really easily.
A spreadsheet is NOT a database! Argh! As a person who gets asked to fix these kinds of projects once they hit a wall (performance/concurrency/etc) and then have to migrate them to a proper DB platform, just stop it! Put it on in a DB up front and save some poor developer their sanity. Please.
But in all seriousness, using a spreadsheet for prototyping makes perfect sense. Why waste a ton of time setting up a database when you're still figuring out what you are doing, and a spreadsheet works just fine? Yes, there's some hassle when you have to migrate, but that's compared to the hassle of setup. The amount of time to get the first iteration launched is a LOT more valuable than time down the road.
A spreadsheet is NOT a database! Argh! As a person who gets asked to fix these kinds of projects once they hit a wall (performance/concurrency/etc) and then have to migrate them to a proper DB platform, just stop it! Put it on in a DB up front and save some poor developer their sanity. Please.
I beat my head on APIs from Google spreadsheets, so good on ya! How does blockspring deal with Google Spreadsheet availability issues? I remember the spreadsheet not always being available.
Same here! We went from using Spreadsheets to using our own flat files on Drive, but the API service would throw random rejection errors for both. Long story short, we learned that you should not try to use Drive or Google docs as a program database. It's designed first and foremost for users.
I beat my head on APIs from Google spreadsheets, so good on ya! How does blockspring deal with Google Spreadsheet availability issues? I remember the spreadsheet not always being available.
Same here! We went from using Spreadsheets to using our own flat files on Drive, but the API service would throw random rejection errors for both. Long story short, we learned that you should not try to use Drive or Google docs as a program database. It's designed first and foremost for users.
https://code.google.com/p/gdata-java-client/ <--- Spreadsheets api is one of the three apis still alive out of all gdata apis
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here! We went from using Spreadsheets to using our own flat files on Drive, but the API service would throw random rejection errors for both. Long story short, we learned that you should not try to use Drive or Google docs as a program database. It's designed first and foremost for users.
I was looking for the google spreadsheets api earlier today and I noticed it has not been migrated away from GData yet. I wonder why this is not getting any love https://code.google.com/p/gdata-java-client/ <--- Spreadsheets api is one of the three apis still alive out of all gdata apis
I'm a big fan of spreadsheets instead of db -- it has it's limitations of course, but works great for apps with a few thousand read-only records (items/products or even just text captions). I built HasGluten [1, 2] with react + google spreadsheet, hosted on github for free, you get a cheap, scalable, geo-distributed software stack, with simple interfaces to maintain both code (GitHub Pages) and data (Google Sheets —…