This was originally published on my blog, where I often write about learning to code, remote work, and women in tech.
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Anything can be a database, this is really cool.
Thank you, Ben!
You're awesome. This project is awesome.
I did something similar in python a few years ago to do automated document creation.
It turned a few weeks worth of work into a few seconds. This is such a useful tool in the business world where everybody works in spreadsheets.
Wow, thanks so much Evan! I agree, it's super powerful especially since it's so easy for people who don't code to contribute to and see the data.
Thats great, but why sheets? Google already provides Firebase which is an NO-SQL cloud database.
Such database is obtimized for loading, writing, search, etc. It is certainly faster than executing sheets in both development and execution.
quran.com/25
Using Google sheets isn't for every project, but using Sheets is easier for MVPs and simple projects that have a lot of collaboration. Almost every company uses Sheets already and very easy to view/edit the data.
Great job! I did something similar in Flutter and at the end with all the synch logic between devices... Well, it was a good learning experience. For my next app, I used Firebase. I found it much-much-much easier.
Super cool!
I remember when I was in college for my Software Engineer class we had to create a Ebay replica and you will get extra points if you used Google Sheets as a DB. We were the only team that did, which it was awesome but Google Sheets was to extremely slow :( but hey! it was fun to learn.
Also I have been several years in the industry and I have never heard of anyone using Google Sheets as a database in a production application. Could you provide me some example of companies or apps that use it in production? I want to do research on how they did it and why, would be super interesting to see if I can apply it to a future project :)
A few questions:
Is there a reason why you are mixing var and const?
Is there a reason why you are mixing fat arrow function vs normal function?
Thanks so much for the post. Keep the good work!
I don't think many production applications use it as a database to be honest. I'm sure there are, but I'm not familiar with which ones!
One thing I've been thinking about is actually using Google Sheets as a database, but then running cron jobs to "save" the info into a more traditional database, to improve with speed.
As for your questions, I really shouldn't be mixing the functions and var/const. I typically write normal functions, so anything you see that's a normal function was probably code written by me. In a few cases, the arrow functions were probably the snippet code copied from Google's API docs. :)
Really neat, Steph! Saw you post this on Women Make and I was super impressed. I'm currently learning Node.js and it's awesome seeing what you've built in using it.
Thanks Irma!! Love that you're learning Node as well. If you want to join, I set up another Telegram group of ~50 of us learning to code (many learning JS/Node). That's where the inputs from Progression Page came from ☺️
I'd love to join, Steph! :) Let me know how I can join the Telegram group.
You can join us here!
t.me/joinchat/IZhyDBT6OwaAdaIHADbFQw
I am very, very curious how many websites are using Google Sheets for this type of usecase. I am very interested in some surveys on data about this.
I think it's not that small amount of people.
Yes, I am seeing lots of people utilizing it more these days! Would be interested to see data as well.
Love the notion of using google sheets as a database! You’ve got me tempted to do something now...
Thanks Ian! Excited to see what you make! 😀
This is awesome! :D
Thank you!
Nice 👌 idea
But wouldn't it be difficult when you want to create some complex relationship like foreign keys and etc
🤔🤔
I definitely think there are cases where you can't utilize Google Sheets as a DB, but I think it's good for MVPs and collaborative projects where multiple people need access to view/change the data easily. 🙂
uhmm interesting. I don't really think that happens in a real app production app. Not everyone should be touching the database, specially if you only have one version and can't give roles to it which I believe that the case for Google Sheets. If you want to use a database just to view/change data might as well use a normal sql database and use app to view it in a table grid form like MySQL workbench does. This app will give you a similar feeling to Google Sheets via displaying the data in a grid.
Amazing!