Massive Multilingual App

#1

Hi Experts,

I have a massive (2M+ records) database I’ve built and been maintaining for close to 20 years for a popular website similar to imdb. I’m thinking of moving that to a glideapp. Here are the questions before I embark on this.

  1. I see the following limitations for Google Sheets – Up to 5 million cells for spreadsheets that are created in or converted to Google Sheets . 40,000 new rows at a time. Maximum number of columns of 18,278 columns. Assuming I stay within these limits how performant will be the app – Of course these constrains will be adhered to - https://www.glideapps.com/pro#summary

  2. I want this to be duo lingual like the website. I have the transliteration for all 2M+ records between English and Unicode characters. Is there some kind of a global variable I can use to let users select/change their language of choice so that the app can look up the data from either appropriate columns or sheets with the language preferences

  3. (Not directly related to glide) Are there any preferred solutions for MySQL -> Google Sheets synchronization?

  4. Any other preliminary considerations I should be thinking of right now ?

Thanks

#2

Create a user-specific choice in your user profiles sheet, and set the visibility of tabs based on it. Let’s say you can build a whole tab with English and it will only display when English is chosen, same goes for other languages.

I think you can start by reading this:

#3

@ajchan First to make sure that nothing is lost in translation, I am assuming that by “2M+ records” you mean:

  • 2 million
  • Records: table items or list items or rows

My immediate answer would be that the scale of your project exceeds Google Sheets and Glide.

If all data needs to be accessed by the app at all times or reside in a Google Sheets at all times, with 2 million records, you will achieve that neither with Google Sheets, nor with Glide (for the time being). You would have to wait until Glide apps work with other databases such as Big Query.

Also, I would avoid a technical setup where you might be able to make it work somehow, but that really would be a short-term fix.

That being said, this is just my knee-jerk answer and based on my current understanding so far of the limitations of Glide and Google Sheets.

#4

Thanks @ThinhDinh – Since there will be several categories the users would want to search off of, ‘tabs’ won’t work. I need to have them as as inline lists. Where I’m confused is to depending on a value of the user profile, how do I select a separate sheet ? I presume I can use different inline lists based on different sheets and have the visibility set that way.

Thanks a lot @nathanaelb for the caution. Yes, 2 Million in total, largest table has about 150k rows, total rows across all tables will be 300k, each of the tables having anywhere from 5-20 columns. Maybe these numbers are lower than what you think ?

What would be a reasonable scale of the data that glide can handle ?

#5

@ajchan

It is good we confirmed what we are talking about:

  • 2 million data points or cells across all of your tablez (or worksheets)
  • A total of approximately 300K rows across all worksheets in your spreadsheet (unique document associated to your app).

I still think you would be pushing it. I don’t think Glide can currently support than amount of data in one single app.

Pricing & Limits per plan

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#6

That’s great to know. So, I presume 25000 rows of data is not per worksheet but combined rows across all worksheets. I assumed the former.

#7

I don’t have any experience here, but this may be worth a look: https://flex.io/

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