

How I store server logs in Google Spreadsheets - hakanu
http://hakanu.net/2014/09/14/how-i-store-server-logs-in-google-spreadsheets/

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duncanawoods
I'm pretty disappointed with google sheet at the moment. I built some mildly
complex spreadsheets for time tracking, nutrition, planning and such. They
worked fine a year ago but I have experienced a massive drop in performance
over the past few months. They take a minute to open and awfully slow to
update calculations and no longer work reliably offline either. This is on an
quad core desktop ffs.

This will kill cloud office apps if what works today doesn't work tomorrow.
Cloud should not mean total loss of control of the version of the application.
Something like gdocs should be offering frozen past versions of the app to
avoid this type of thing being possible. Its not like frozen versions would
actually add any maintenance cost to google.

These sheets are small and just have a few array forumulae. Nothing excel 20
years would have broken a sweat over.

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imjared
Have you upgraded to the newest version of google spreadsheets? We were having
some performance issues that sound just like what you're experiencing and as
soon as we made the switch, our sheets were super fast.

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duncanawoods
I upgraded a couple when it was first released but a few basic features not
supported so had to abandon the attempt.

I've tried copying a problem sheet to a new file and first impressions are
positive. Thanks.

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hakanu
As far as I observed, latest big update improved the performance of large
sheets a lot. Plus, using chrome is also making some positive difference.
However, copying and pasting large data is still a problem. Instead I
recommend to use copy to option within google drive.

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teddyh
If those server logs could contain customer-identifiable and/or confidential
data, storing them in a cloud service might not be a good idea.

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hakanu
The spreadsheets are not open to world. They are restricted to the certain
gmail accounts. Don't you think this is safe? Plus, what is the difference
between storing in the spreadsheets or parse.com or loggly.com etc? in-house
storing is cool but so costly and hard to analyze.

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teddyh
No, this is not safe — _Google_ still has access, and can give additional
access to whoever compels them to do so.

This is, indeed, no different from other cloud-based solutions. In-house
storage “costly”? Really? Well, what is security worth?

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justinchen
We kinda whipped up something for our own purposes (logging any data using
google spreadsheets). It's called Sheetstorm and basically you just post data
using the API and it'll automatically create a new sheet or append it to an
existing one.

It's handy for logging and analyzing arbitrary stats.

[https://www.sheetstorm.io/](https://www.sheetstorm.io/)

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zo1
This story reminded me of this:

[http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/80885/new-p2p-service-uses-
gmail...](http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/80885/new-p2p-service-uses-gmail-
storage)

Note, it's from 2005, blast from the past.

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hakanu
haha so smart! this sentence hit me "Ever wondered what you might do with the
2GB storage"

such a nice hackery!

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dozy
To address the speed problem you could still leverage sqlite locally as cache
layer in between your in-memory cache and longer-term google spreadsheet
cache, and use a repeating job to move the sqlite data over to google
spreadsheets (and subsequently delete those rows in the sqlite, keeping the
sqlite db at a small size).

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hakanu
that's a good idea actually. It will be safer for retries thanks! For future
reference, increasing the number of rows persisted makes the time complexity
also increase.

