Observed Signal · Apr 26, 2026 · Technical Release · Source: DEV Community · Impact: 2/5 · Sentiment: Neutral
Google Sheets API silently drops rows on concurrent writes
The Google Sheets API method values.append can silently drop rows when multiple clients append concurrently: calls can read the same last-row position and overwrite each other with no error. Many "Sheets-as-backend" services (SheetDB, Sheety, SheetBest, NoCodeAPI) forward requests to values.append and inherit the issue. The author built an open-source project, SheetForge (MIT), that guarantees durable, ordered, retry-safe writes by queuing per-sheet writes, persisting a write ledger in Postgres, using Redis Streams for delivery, acquiring pg_advisory_xact_lock inside a Postgres transaction as the fence, and deduping with idempotency keys. SheetForge is available as one-click hosted SaaS and as a self-hostable repository; it does not circumvent Google’s ~60 writes/minute per sheet cap. Publication date: 2026-04-26.
Fixes a real data-loss bug affecting forms and landing-page backends (relevant to MarTech and landing-page workflows). Useful operational pattern (queue + durable ledger + DB advisory locks) but narrow in scope and not industry-shifting.
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Key Takeaways & Evidence Grounding
- Google Sheets values.append can silently drop rows under concurrent appends (race condition between read-last-row and write).
- Popular Sheets-as-backend wrappers (SheetDB, Sheety, SheetBest, NoCodeAPI) forward requests to values.append and thus inherit the bug.
- SheetForge is an MIT-licensed open-source project that queues per-sheet writes, uses Postgres (write ledger + pg_advisory_xact_lock) and Redis Streams with idempotency keys to ensure exactly-once ordered writes.
- SheetForge is offered as one-click hosted SaaS (getsheetforge.vercel.app) and as a self-hostable repository on GitHub; it does not increase Google’s per-sheet write throughput (≈60 writes/minute cap).
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