Fastest way to search for a row in a large Google Sheet using/in Google Apps Script

GAS is quite powerful and you could write a full fledged web-app using a Google Sheet as the DB back-end. There are many reasons not to do this but I figure in some cases it is okay.

I think the biggest issue will be performance issues when looking for rows based on some criteria in a sheet with a lot of rows. I know there are many ways to "query" a sheet but I can't find reliable information on which is the fastest.

One of the complexities is that many people can edit a sheet which means there are a variable number of situations you'd have to account for. For the sake of simplicity, I want to assume the sheet:

• Is locked down so only one person can see it
• The first column has the row number (=row())

The most basic query is finding a row where a specific column equals some value.

Which method would be the fastest?

I have a sheet with ~19k rows and ~38 columns, filled with all sorts of unsorted real-world data. That is almost 700k rows so I figured it would be a good sheet to time a few methods and see which is the fastest.

• method 1: get sheet as a 2D array then go through each row
• method 2: get sheet as a 2D array, sort it, then using a binary search algorithm to find the row
• method 3: make a UrlFetch call to Google visualization query and don't provide last row
• method 4: make a UrlFetch call to Google visualization query and provide last row

Here are the my query functions.

function method1(spreadsheetID, sheetName, columnIndex, query)
{
    // get the sheet values excluding header, 
    var rowValues = SpreadsheetApp.openById(spreadsheetID).getSheetByName(sheetName).getSheetValues(2, 1, -1, -1);

    // loop through each row
    for(var i = 0, numRows = rowValues.length; i < numRows; ++i)
    {
        // return it if found
        if(rowValues[i][columnIndex] == query) return rowValues[i]
    }

    return false;
}

function method2(spreadsheetID, sheetName, columnIndex, query)
{
    // get the sheet values excluding header
    var rowValues = SpreadsheetApp.openById(spreadsheetID).getSheetByName(sheetName).getSheetValues(2, 1, -1, -1);

    // sort it
    rowValues.sort(function(a, b){
        if(a[columnIndex] < b[columnIndex]) return -1;
        if(a[columnIndex] > b[columnIndex]) return 1;
        return 0;
    });

    // search using binary search
    var foundRow = matrixBinarySearch(rowValues, columnIndex, query, 0, rowValues.length - 1);

    // return if found
    if(foundRow != -1)
    {
        return rowValues[foundRow];
    }

    return false;
}

function method3(spreadsheetID, sheetName, queryColumnLetterStart, queryColumnLetterEnd, queryColumnLetterSearch, query)
{
    // SQL like query
    myQuery = "SELECT * WHERE " + queryColumnLetterSearch + " = '" + query + "'";

    // the query URL
    // don't provide last row in range selection
    var qvizURL = 'https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/' + spreadsheetID + '/gviz/tq?tqx=out:json&headers=1&sheet=' + sheetName + '&range=' + queryColumnLetterStart + ":" + queryColumnLetterEnd + '&tq=' + encodeURIComponent(myQuery);

    // fetch the data
    var ret = UrlFetchApp.fetch(qvizURL, {headers: {Authorization: 'Bearer ' + ScriptApp.getOAuthToken()}}).getContentText();

    // remove some crap from the return string
    return JSON.parse(ret.replace("/*O_o*/", "").replace("google.visualization.Query.setResponse(", "").slice(0, -2));
}

function method4(spreadsheetID, sheetName, queryColumnLetterStart, queryColumnLetterEnd, queryColumnLetterSearch, query)
{
    // find the last row in the sheet
    var lastRow = SpreadsheetApp.openById(spreadsheetID).getSheetByName(sheetName).getLastRow();

    // SQL like query
    myQuery = "SELECT * WHERE " + queryColumnLetterSearch + " = '" + query + "'";

    // the query URL
    var qvizURL = 'https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/' + spreadsheetID + '/gviz/tq?tqx=out:json&headers=1&sheet=' + sheetName + '&range=' + queryColumnLetterStart + "1:" + queryColumnLetterEnd + lastRow + '&tq=' + encodeURIComponent(myQuery);

    // fetch the data
    var ret = UrlFetchApp.fetch(qvizURL, {headers: {Authorization: 'Bearer ' + ScriptApp.getOAuthToken()}}).getContentText();

    // remove some crap from the return string
    return JSON.parse(ret.replace("/*O_o*/", "").replace("google.visualization.Query.setResponse(", "").slice(0, -2));
}

My binary search algorithm:

function matrixBinarySearch(matrix, columnIndex, query, firstIndex, lastIndex)
{
    // find the value using binary search
    // https://www.w3resource.com/javascript-exercises/javascript-array-exercise-18.php

    // first make sure the query string is valid
    // if it is less than the smallest value
    // or larger than the largest value
    // it is not valid
    if(query < matrix[firstIndex][columnIndex] || query > matrix[lastIndex][columnIndex]) return -1;

    // if its the first row
    if(query == matrix[firstIndex][columnIndex]) return firstIndex;

    // if its the last row
    if(query == matrix[lastIndex][columnIndex]) return lastIndex;

    // now start doing binary search
    var middleIndex = Math.floor((lastIndex + firstIndex)/2);

    while(matrix[middleIndex][columnIndex] != query && firstIndex < lastIndex)
    {
        if(query < matrix[middleIndex][columnIndex])
        {
            lastIndex = middleIndex - 1;
        }
        else if(query > matrix[middleIndex][columnIndex])
        {
            firstIndex = middleIndex + 1;
        }

        middleIndex = Math.floor((lastIndex + firstIndex)/2);
    }

    return matrix[middleIndex][columnIndex] == query ? middleIndex : -1;
}

This is the function I used to test them all:

// each time this function is called it will try one method
// the first time it is called it will try method1
// then method2, then method3, then method4
// after it does method4 it will start back at method1
// we will use script properties to save which method is next
// we also want to use the same query string for each batch so we'll save that in script properties too
function testIt()
{
    // get the sheet where we're staving run times
    var runTimesSheet = SpreadsheetApp.openById("...").getSheetByName("times");

    // we want to see true speed tests and don't want server side caching so we a copy of our data sheet
    // make a copy of our data sheet and get its ID
    var tempSheetID = SpreadsheetApp.openById("...").copy("temp sheet").getId();

    // get script properties
    var scriptProperties = PropertiesService.getScriptProperties();

    // the counter
    var searchCounter = Number(scriptProperties.getProperty("searchCounter"));

    // index of search list we want to query for
    var searchListIndex = Number(scriptProperties.getProperty("searchListIndex"));

    // if we're at 0 then we need to get the index of the query string
    if(searchCounter == 0)
    {
        searchListIndex = Math.floor(Math.random() * searchList.length);
        scriptProperties.setProperty("searchListIndex", searchListIndex);
    }

    // query string
    var query = searchList[searchListIndex];

    // save relevant data
    var timerRow = ["method" + (searchCounter + 1), searchListIndex, query, 0, "", "", "", ""];

    // run the appropriate method
    switch(searchCounter)
    {
        case 0:
            // start time
            var start = (new Date()).getTime();

            // run the query
            var ret = method1(tempSheetID, "Extract", 1, query);

            // end time
            timerRow[3] = ((new Date()).getTime() - start) / 1000;

            // if we found the row save its values in the timer output so we can confirm it was found
            if(ret)
            {
                timerRow[4] = ret[0];
                timerRow[5] = ret[1];
                timerRow[6] = ret[2]; 
                timerRow[7] = ret[3];
            }
            break;
        case 1:
            var start = (new Date()).getTime();
            var ret = method2(tempSheetID, "Extract", 1, query);
            timerRow[3] = ((new Date()).getTime() - start) / 1000;
            if(ret)
            {
                timerRow[4] = ret[0];
                timerRow[5] = ret[1];
                timerRow[6] = ret[2]; 
                timerRow[7] = ret[3];
            }
            break;
        case 2:
            var start = (new Date()).getTime();
            var ret = method3(tempSheetID, "Extract", "A", "AL", "B", query);
            timerRow[3] = ((new Date()).getTime() - start) / 1000;
            if(ret.table.rows.length)
            {
                timerRow[4] = ret.table.rows[0].c[0].v;
                timerRow[5] = ret.table.rows[0].c[1].v;
                timerRow[6] = ret.table.rows[0].c[2].v;
                timerRow[7] = ret.table.rows[0].c[3].v;
            }
            break;
        case 3:
            var start = (new Date()).getTime();
            var ret = method3(tempSheetID, "Extract", "A", "AL", "B", query);
            timerRow[3] = ((new Date()).getTime() - start) / 1000;
            if(ret.table.rows.length)
            {
                timerRow[4] = ret.table.rows[0].c[0].v;
                timerRow[5] = ret.table.rows[0].c[1].v;
                timerRow[6] = ret.table.rows[0].c[2].v;
                timerRow[7] = ret.table.rows[0].c[3].v;
            }
            break;
    }

    // delete the temp file
    DriveApp.getFileById(tempSheetID).setTrashed(true);

    // save run times
    runTimesSheet.appendRow(timerRow);

    // start back at 0 if we're the end
    if(++searchCounter == 4) searchCounter = 0;

    // save the search counter
    scriptProperties.setProperty("searchCounter", searchCounter);
}

I have a global variable searchList that is an array of various query strings -- some are in the sheet, some are not.

I ran testit on a trigger to run every minute. After 152 iterations I had 38 batches. Looking at the result, this is what I see for each method:

| Method  | Minimum Seconds | Maximum Seconds | Average Seconds |
|---------|-----------------|-----------------|-----------------|
| method1 |            8.24 |           36.94 |           11.86 |
| method2 |            9.93 |           23.38 |           14.09 |
| method3 |            1.92 |            5.48 |            3.06 |
| method4 |            2.20 |           11.14 |            3.36 |

So it appears that, at least for my data-set, is using Google visualization query is the fastest.