With an easy-to-use interface and high collaboration capabilities, Google Sheets has become one of the most popular data management tools used at work. With Google Sheets, you can simplify storing manually entered information like business KPIs or specifically-formatted SaaS data. But what happens when you want to combine data stored in Google Sheets with other business data?

While Google Sheets works well for managing small amounts of data that are better edited manually, application data is stored in a relational database like PostgreSQL. To combine data in Google Sheets with data in PostgreSQL, it’s best to load the data in Google Sheets to PostgreSQL.

With Airbyte Cloud, you can easily move data between any data source and destination, including popular databases, data warehouses, and business applications. This tutorial will take you through the steps needed to set up Airbyte Cloud and copy over your Google Sheets data into a PostgreSQL instance running in AWS RDS. We will also cover the steps needed to connect to Google Sheets and AWS RDS from Airbyte Cloud.
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Prerequisites

Below are the prerequisite tools you’ll need to get started on copying your Google Sheets data to PostgreSQL. All three cloud platforms (Google, Airbyte, and AWS) provide free credits to get you started.

1. You’ll need to get an Airbyte Cloud account to do the data replication. You can sign up for Airbyte Cloud here.
2. You will need a Google account to manage Google Sheets. You can create a Google account by signing up at the link here.
3. You will need an instance of PostgreSQL that you can connect to remotely. You can get a hosted PostgreSQL instance through Amazon RDS at the link here.

Step 1: Set up your Google Cloud Platform account

You have two ways to connect your Google Sheets with Airbyte Cloud.

The first option uses OAuth to authenticate with your Google account and give Airbyte access to all your sheets directly. This option is suitable when all the sheets are linked to a single account and requires no extra setting.

The second option requires to create a service account. This option is more suitable when the Google Sheets are created across multiple accounts or you want to give access to only a few Google Sheets.

If you’re using a shared Google Drive that contains your sheets or would instead use the Google Sheets API to give Airbyte access, you will need to enable the Google Sheets API service and generate service account credentials.

The first step is to enable the Google Sheets API for your Google Cloud Platform account. Log in to the Cloud Console and search for Google Sheets API. If the service is not already enabled, you will be prompted to enable the service.

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Next, search for the Google Drive API service and enable it the same way.

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Next, create a service account that will generate credentials to access Google Sheets. From the Cloud Console, go to the Credentials page and create a new service account.

Give the service account name and click on Create and Continue.

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Under role, select Owner. This role will be used to access Google Sheets.

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Once the account is created, you will be able to view its details. Make a note of the email, which you will be using later.

Go to the keys tab and create a new key. When the key file is ready, download it. Download the JSON file.

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Finally, login to Google Sheets, and create a new spreadsheet. Click on share and add the email for the service account created in the previous step to give it access.

Step 2: Set up a PostgreSQL instance in AWS RDS

In this example, we will set up a PostgreSQL instance using Amazon RDS. Before creating the PostgreSQL instance, we will first need to create a Security Group that whitelists Airbyte Cloud IP to give it access to the PostgreSQL instance.

Login to AWS and go to EC2 > Security Groups > Create security group. Give the group a name and description. In the Inbound Rules section, select PostgreSQL as the type and add ‘34.106.109.131/32’ (Airbyte Cloud IP) in the Source section and add the rule.  Add another rule for PostgreSQL and select the ‘My IP’ option. This will allow you to connect to the database from your local machine through the psql CLI.

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Once the Security Group has been created, you can now create a PostgreSQL instance by going to Amazon RDS > Dashboard > Create database.

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Choose the Standard create method and the PostgresQL engine option.

Follow the prompts to fill in the required fields. In the Connectivity section, choose Yes under Public access and select the security group created in the previous step.

Once the database instance is created, you will be prompted with your database credentials. Make a note of the username and password which will be required in later steps.

Also make a note of the endpoint and the port in the Connectivity & security section which will be required to configure Airbyte Cloud.

Make sure that the DB instance's public accessibility is set to Yes to allow external connections. To modify the Public access setting, see Modifying an Amazon RDS DB instance.

Next, connect to your PostgreSQL instance  to create the database that will be used to backup your data by running the following command on your psql CLI. If this is the first time you are connecting to this DB instance, or if you didn't yet create a database for this RDS for PostgreSQL instance, you can connect to the default postgres database using the 'master username' and password.

psql -h <YOUR_POSTGRESQL_HOST> -p <YOUR_PORT> -U <YOUR_USERNAME> -W

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You will then be prompted to enter your password. Once entered, you will have access to the database through the psql shell.

When creating an RDS PostgreSQL instance, the default database created is called ‘postgres’. For this example we will create a new database to backup our Google Sheet data by running:

CREATE DATABASE google_sheets_backup;

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Once created, you should see the database you started along with the default databases.

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Since you are currently using the master username and password which has full privileges to your PostgreSQL instance, you may want to create a specific user that has access only to the google_sheets_backup database. These user credentials can be used with Airbyte without having to worry about the rest of your instance.

Create the new user by running the following command:

CREATE USER <NEW_USERNAME> WITH PASSWORD <NEW_PASSWORD>;

Next, you will need to grant this new user access to the ‘google_sheets_backup’ database by running the following:

GRANT USAGE ON SCHEMA "public" TO <NEW_USERNAME>;
GRANT SELECT ON ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA "public" TO <NEW_USERNAME>;

Step 3: Set up Google Sheets as the Airbyte source

Go to Airbyte Cloud and create a new connection. Give the source a name and select Google Sheets as the source type. You can read about all the configuration details on the Airbyte Google Sheets source documentation. Then, you can give Airbyte access to Google Sheets by signing in with your Google account or providing a service account.

Option 1: Sign in with your Google account

Click on the Sign in with Google button and follow the steps to sign in using your Google account.

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Choose the See all your Google Sheets spreadsheets option and click on Continue.

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Once the authentication process is complete, you should be redirected to Airbyte with the updated status and a message showing that the Authentication succeeded.

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Option 2: Use your service account credentials

If you want to use your service account to authenticate Airbyte, copy the contents of the JSON credentials file downloaded in step 2 in the Service Account Information section.

Next, you will have to enter the Spreadsheet ID for the Google Sheet you want to sync.

Note: This is required for both authentication options.

You can find the Spreadsheet ID by looking at the URL for the Google Sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/{SPREADSHEET_ID}/edit#gid=0

Step 4: Set up Postgres as the Airbyte destination

Once Google Sheets has been successfully configured as the source, you will be prompted to configure your destination. Give the destination a name and select Postgres as the Destination type. You can read about all the configuration details on the Airbyte Postgres destination documentation.

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Enter the host, the port, the DB name (google_sheets_backup in this case), and the user and password you used when setting up PostgreSQL in Step 2. Once configured, click on set up destination.

Step 5: Set up a Google Sheets to PostgreSQL connection

Once the source and destination are configured, you can access your connection settings. You should be able to see the sheet data.

You can set the repliction frequency for all sheets. You can then set the sync mode individually for each sheet. You can run a Full Refresh sync that overwrites or appends new data at the destination. In this case, we will select the Full refresh | Overwrite sync mode.

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You can also choose between using Raw Data or Basic Normalization. We will select Basic Normalization to set up the connection in this example. You can also choose to apply custom data transformations with dbt, but we will keep it simple by skipping the data transformation part in this example.

Once configured, save the connection and click sync now to run your first sync once configured.

Once the sync is complete, you should see how many rows were copied (702 in this case). Next, you can connect to the PostgreSQL CLI and connect to the google_sheets_backup database to view the tables created by Airbyte by running:

\c google_sheets_backup
\dt

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You can see the tables created by Airbyte, including the normalized data and the _airbyte_raw_sheet1 tables.

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You can view the structure in the financial_data table by running:

\d sheet1

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If you want to cast some fields to specific types you can write some dbt transformations in SQL and run them after your Airbyte sync. You can add some new rows to the spreadsheet and rerun the sync to see that the old data gets overwritten.

For the sake of this example, we added 10 new rows to our spreadsheet.

Conclusion

To summarize how we can move data from Google Sheets to PostgreSQL using Airbyte Cloud:

1. Set up your Google Cloud Platform account
2. Set up a PostgreSQL instance in AWS RDS
3. Set up Google Sheets as the Airbyte source
4. Set up Postgres as the Airbyte destination
5. Set up a Google Sheets to PostgreSQL connection

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