Can I Really Use Google Sheets as a Database?

I’ve heard of some people successfully using Google Sheets for smaller applications, but it’s definitely not recommended for larger scale projects. If you need to scale up, a proper database system would handle things much more efficiently.

Yeah, exactly! If you're considering it for a small project, Google Sheets might work fine initially. However, be prepared to switch to a proper database when you outgrow its capabilities. Tools like SQLite or Firebase can offer much more robust solutions.

Using Google Sheets as a database might sound appealing, but there are definitely some drawbacks. For instance, it lacks transaction support, meaning you can run into issues where one action succeeds and another fails, leading to inconsistencies. Plus, there are cell limits; you can't store more than about 1 million records if you have just 10 columns. Then there's concurrency—if multiple users are editing at the same time, your data can get messy fast. And Google Sheets doesn't keep an exhaustive history of changes like a traditional database would. Basically, it’s just not built for that kind of workload.