One of the key features I use in Excel spreadsheets all the time are the sort and filter options. Fusion appears to have a "sort" option if you mark an area as a Table, but I can't find a filter option. Does it exist? How do I access it?
Foundry provides a high volume of data manipulation tools, however even though fusion enables for some tabular manipulation, it is not one of them.
If you have a fusion sheet with a lot of data that you want to filter and manipulate, the recommendation is to sync it to a dataset and use an iterative tool, such as contour, quiver or code workbooks.
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I am looking to export the analytics data towards a database sql. Do you know one tools who could help me?
Do you know how I can see on Google analytics the traffic resulting from a particular URL??
Thank you all!
You have several options:
UI export: in the top/right corner of your reports you should have an option to download data in various formats (XLS, CSV...)
API: you can use the reporting API to get it out in a programmatic/automated way
One thing you won't be able to do with the free version no matter what you try:
Reconstruct the entire analytics data: whether with the UI or API, you're limited to querying only 7 dimensions maximum at a time (eg ga:country, ga:deviceCategory etc...), and cannot combine certain dimensions together (no official list available, it's trial and error to find out), whereas there are dozens of dimensions available.
So the question for you becomes:
How much resources do I want to invest into partially reverse-engineering Google Analytics vs. the value it brings me vs. what it would cost to get alternative analytics solutions?
I found a cloud based solution which exports raw google analytics data to MySQL database. Setup is simple, all you need to do is add your Google Analytics connection and a database to which the data needs to be exported.
MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server and BigQuery are the supported destinations. It creates a few custom dimensions in your Google Analytics account and Tag in Google Tag Manager to send hits to Google Analytics. Data is exported from Google Analytics to the selected destination every day.
I have been using it for last three months now. Hope this helps.
Exporting the analytics data is a thorny one.
My understanding is that paid GA usage allows the export of all collected GA data.
But free usage does not.
For free usage, all you are going to be able to do, realistically, is to create a report over your GA data (in Data Studio or Google Sheets) that contains the rows and columns you want, and then collect this information and squirt it into a SQL table. You are also liable to come up against sampling.
Re traffic from particular URL, the news is better: just filter on Hostname and Page.
I'm looking into using google sheets as some sort of aggregation solution for different data sources. It's reasonably easy to configure those data sources to output to a common google sheets and it's need to online for sharing. This sheet would act as my raw, un-treated data source. I would then have some dashboards/sub-tables based on that data.
Now, early tests seem to show I'm going to have to be careful about efficiency as it seems I'm pushing against the maximum 2 millions cells for spreadsheets (we're talking about 15-20k rows of data & 100 or so columns). Handling the data also seems to be pretty slow (regardless of cells limits), at least using formulas, even considering using arrays & avoiding vlookups etc...
My plan would be to create other documents (separate documents, not just adding tabs) & refer to the source data through import-range & using spreadsheet-key. Those would be using subsets of the data only required for each dashboards. This should allow me to create dashboard that would run faster than if setup directly off my big raw data file, or at least that's my thinking.
Am I embarking on a fool's errand here? Anyone has been looking into similarly large dataset on google docs? Basically trying to see if what I have in mind is even practical or not... If you have better ideas in terms of architecture please do share...
I ran into a similar issue once.
Using a multi layer approach like the one you suggested is indeed one method to work around this.
The spreadsheets themselves have no problem storing those two million cells, it's the displaying of all the data that is problematic, so accessing it via Import or scripts can be worthwhile.
Some other things I would consider:
How up to date does the data need to be? Import range is slow and can make the dashboard you create sluggish, maybe a scheduled import with the aggregation happening in Google Apps Script is a viable option.
At that point you might even want to consider using BigQuery for the data storage (and aggregation), whether you pull the data from another spreadsheet in this project or a database that will not run into any issues once you exceed 2 million elements would be future proof.
Alternatively you can use fusion tables* for the storage which are drive based , although I think you cannot run sophisticated SQL queries on it.
*: You probably need to enable them in Drive via right click > more > Connect more apps
We are a Google Apps for Your Domain enterprise account, and Real Estate brokerage. We want to build a web application that ties together several Google Apps services. It would be great if we could do it all in Google Apps Script, but at the same time may stretch the limits of what's possible in Google Apps Script. We do not have the time or resources to do full application development using Google Web Toolkit (GWT). Is a framework approach the right solution?
We want to build an application that allows our agents to create a real-estate listing record. Each record is large, with 300 - 400 form fields per record depending on the property type. Many of the fields are 'lookup' fields with specific values in either a select-list format, or multiple checkbox format. (e.g. roof-type = choose one: slate, shingle, rolled-roof; appliances = choose all: refrigerator, stove, dishwasher; etc.)
Each record will also need associated photos in original high resolution format and also smaller resolution sets for display in various contexts. Each record would have 24-50 1MB photos. I'm thinking that we could use and integrate Google Drive for the photos because the process can be simplified for the user to drag and drop a folder from desktop to Google Drive. Having the images stored in Google Drive, and only referenced from the application would solve part of the implied storage question. I read that there is a 200MB ScriptDb Quota in Google Apps Script so I can see that being a potential deal-breaker just for the 'data' alone. I don't have an exact database storage requirement, but I know we'll have 700 records to start and that number will grow to several thousand.
The users of the application are all internal, so GAFYD auth integration is a nice benefit.
There is no form api currently, so how do we create the data entry form in the first place? It appears we would need to manually create the form, or else create a sample spreadsheet to auto-generate the form. But then how do we enhance the form to modify the select lists and attach validation rules, and dynamic form behaviors like creating/showing/hiding additional elements based on user input (e.g. enter # of rooms; then enter dimensions for each room).
Another potential showstopper is the resizing of photos. We want access to original photos in order to create further marketing materials, however in the application UI we would need to use various sized images at smaller dimensions for efficiency. (e.g. show list of properties with one thumbnail to represent each record) I guess there would be methods in the Google Drive api to create sub-folders to store the resized images, but is there access to graphics manipulation software like gd (maybe through an API to picasa)?
A record should be viewable in different layouts and views. For example full record detail, summary view, marketing flyer view.
Once a record is created, messages need to be sent to the agent creating the record, plus an internal team who processes the record for workflows including copy writing/review + marketing. That seems to potentially fit with the new Google Groups? Once the record is 'approved' then the application needs to generate a marketing email to several hundred external recipients; selected based on business rules from various pools. So the application would need additional storage, or possibly address-book integration to be able to manage contacts.
Future edits to records (e.g. price changes, photo changes) need to trigger the review/approval workflow.
Is Google Apps Script capable of handling the size, scope and complexity of this type of application? Or, would the recommended route be using a micro framework such as http://bcosca.github.com/fatfree/ to tie together all the Google Apps components using their respective APIs?
There is no form api currently, so how do we create the data entry
form in the first place?
There are two, actually: both UiApp (and the drag-and-drop GUI Builder for it) and HtmlService can show arbitrarily complex forms.
I'm thinking that we could use and integrate Google Drive for the
photos because the process can be simplified for the user to drag and
drop a folder from desktop to Google Drive.
Drive is integrated with Apps Script.
I don't have an exact database storage requirement, but I know we'll
have 700 records to start and that number will grow to several
thousand.
You might want to try Google Cloud SQL as your storage, which is 100% natively supported in Apps Script and is a "real" SQL database. However, several thousands records is tiny if you are storing the photos in Drive... ScriptDb could probably scale to several million records in that case.
Google Groups and Contacts are integrated.
Google's documentation can be found here: https://developers.google.com/google-apps/
Google Apps Script is sometimes surprisingly powerful, but it won't be very fast for the amount of data you're implying.
As you said, ScriptDB has a size limit, so it can't store everything. Spreadsheets are limited to 256 columns per sheet and 400000 cells. My way around this is splitting my data into a set of spreadsheets with a set of sheets. If you're in real estate, you can probably split your data by region and neighborhood/area to achieve something similar. If you really want to compact things, you can store a row of data as a stringified JSON object in one cell. However, it will no longer be human-readable.
Unless you're willing to pay extra for storage, it sounds like your pictures will fill up a Drive account fairly quickly. I'm not familiar with images in gadgets, so I'm not sure if they can be embedded from Drive.
I have no experience with Forms, but you can build a gadget using UiApp and call appendRow on a spreadsheet sheet to add the contents of all your fields. And by building your app like that, you can specify valid values for things (and have those read from a "config" spreadsheet).
I have implemented a time booking system based on spreadsheets which the users fill out and then are consolidated into one central (and big) spreadsheet.
After having had a few performance issues the whole application now runs perfectly since several months. However, I will soon run into the size limitation of spreadsheets (400k cells).
In the consolidated spreadsheet I basically do not need more data than the current month. However for statistical purposes I would appreciate if I could make the data easily accessible for the domains users.
Basically the BigQuery Service would be perfect but I did not find an API to write data to it from a spreadsheet. I hesitate to use the Google provided MySQL database for cost reasons.
Are there any other ideas around?
There's a built-in Google BigQuery API for Apps Scripts, you just have to enable it manually under Resources > Use Google APIs. There's also Fusion Tables, that does not have a built-in API but is somewhat simple to use via UrlFetch.
Anyway, if it's statistical purposes, why don't you just "compile" the data in another spreadsheet? e.g. month - amount of entries - total prices - avg etc - etc...
I'm contemplating using google fusion tables rather than using a mysql database to populate a google map. The data that I'm displaying is somewhat proprietary, not top secret, but I'm concerned that if I use a fusion table, people will be able to scrape the the Data, or just grab it directly from the fusion table. I may be misunderstanding how this works, but it seems from some the the threads I read, there is really no way to protect your data.
As usual the answer is: it depends.
If you want to use the Google Maps feature "FusionTableLayer" to display the data, you'll have to be a Google Maps Premier customer to be able to display data from private tables. For "normal" users, this is only possible with public tables.
But when you access the data via the API you can easily just select and display the data you want. But as long as you keep the table private there is no way of getting the original data.
Last but not least you have to trust Google ;-)