SQL on Google Sheets: How to Query Data in Google Spreadsheets
Shuveb Hussain
This article is part of a series on Pervasive SQL– the Zipstack philosophy of leveraging SQL for a wide range of data engineering-related tasks.
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Shuveb Hussain
Shuveb Hussain
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New mobile apps to keep an eye on
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What new social media mobile apps are available in 2023?
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Use new social media apps as marketing funnels
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Try out Twitter Spaces or Clubhouse on iPhone
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What app are you currently experimenting on?
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For instance to do the following using just SQL:
- Extracting data
- Loading data
- Transform data
- Join data between arbitrary sources
- Build data products
- Specify permissions
- Do reverse-ETL
In a previous article, we saw how to query SaaS applications, particularly Salesforce live using SQL. In this, we will see how to include a “non-traditional” data source such as Google Sheets as part of your data engineering workflow seamlessly.
Spreadsheets are super important since non-technical business users love them for all sorts of reasons. Rather than fight their use, wouldn’t it be great to include them tightly and seamlessly into your pipeline? This is where Zipstack’s ability to query 270+ sources live with SQL comes in very handy. There is no need to first centralize the data into a data warehouse. If you did that, you’d lose the ability to include the latest data into your pipeline. Because Zipstack can query any source live, you enable your business to run on the latest data.
Imagine a business user in Finance, Janet, who at the end of the day, fills in final currency exchange rates into a Google Sheets spreadsheet. To generate daily reports, this data would then have to be considered in currency exchange rates conversion queries. With Zipstack, you can refer to Google Sheets spreadsheets as if it were a regular database. Zipstack allows you to connect to any data source using JDBC or the PostgreSQL protocol.
There is no way we can convince business users to learn more complex tools. In the other direction, it becomes cumbersome for data engineers to build pipelines with custom tools that read from spreadsheets. But, with Zipstack’s ability to query data in spreadsheets with just SQL, we enable business users to seamlessly participate in business data workflows. It’s a win-win for both data engineers and business users!
In the video below, we demonstrate the example workflow we discuss above. We see just how simple it is to connect to Google Sheets and then query data from there live.
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