Earlier this week, Google introduced a new tool, dubbed Fusion Tables, intended to bring the kind of cloud collaboration features to database sets that users now enjoy with Google Docs. It also adds various kinds of visualization to large database tables, such as putting them on a map or creating bar charts.
According to the Google Research Blog, Fusion Tables is Google’s first stab at moving data management to the cloud:
Database systems are notorious for being hard to use. It is even more difficult to integrate data from multiple sources and collaborate on large data sets with people outside your organization. Without an easy way to offer all the collaborators access to the same server, data sets get copied, emailed and ftp’d–resulting in multiple versions that get out of sync very quickly.
By Google’s own admission, this is not a database intended to serve queires. The DBMS would need to have performed the query already and output the database records into a spreadsheet or comma-seperated file (.CSV). Fusion Tables supports Microsoft Excel files and Google Docs spreadsheets.
However, the spreadsheet, can be enormous. One of the sample spreadsheets Google is using to demo the product is 129,000 rows. Once the spreadsheet is loaded into a user’s Fusion Tables account, the user can share it with others. Those folks can add their own information to the table, or otherwise manipulate the data. When everyone’s happy with the data, visualization options include showing the data on Google Maps, or through various other charts (bar, scatter). Fusion Tables then allows you to embed these visualizations in any document that supports HTML (Web pages, blogs, discussion groups) simply by copying and pasting the HTML code that Google generates.
Here is the HTML code from the sample spreadsheet of “Popular Baby Names — 1880 to 2008” in which the query was to chart the popularity of the name “Julie.”
But wait there’s more! The tool also allows users to add discussion strings to just about any portion of the spreadsheet table … people can hash out questions over the values of any particular record. Below is a screen shot of comments made on the Baby Names table.
Fusion Tables is an interesting concept for adding collaboration to very large spreadsheets in the cloud.
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