Google is showcasing an alpha version of a cloud-based data management system designed to make it easy for users to integrate data from tables in disparate databases. Google is calling the technology 'Fusion Tables.'Google has pulled the covers off an experimental, cloud-based data
management system designed to ease the process of data integration and
collaboration.
Dubbed Fusion Tables,
the technology is in the alpha phase and is focused on fusing the
areas of data management and collaboration - merging multiple data
sources, discussion of the data, querying, visualization, and Web
publishing.
If you think about databases, theyre very much focused on giving very
high performance SQL [query] processing and high throughput
transactions, which is greatwhat weve been trying to do is take a
different angle on this, said Alon Halevy, a software engineer at
Google. We try to support collaboration among people.
Through Fusion Tables,
users can insert tables from their databases and share them with other
users, circumventing the semantic heterogeneity problems that
occur when trying to merge data from different sources.
Data integration has always been a challenge, Halevy said. Taking
two tables from one database and joining them together versus taking
two tables from different databases and joining them together are very,
very different kinds of activities. The reason is you usually design a
database in such a way that your tables will merge very easily(but)
when two people develop databases independently its a much bigger
challenge.
The technology allows users to filter and aggregate the data, as well
as visualize it on Google Maps and other visualizations from the Google
Visualization
API. In
addition, users can discuss the data with collaborators - those they
share it with - by using a chat feature. If a collaborator with edit
permission changes data during the discussion, viewers will see the
change as part of the discussion trail.
In the current
version, users can upload tabular data sets up to 100 MB each, with a
maximum of 250 MB of data per user. The files can be spreadsheets (.xls
or Google Spreadsheets) and
CSVfiles. Google has entered a few tables in gallery for everyone's use as they try the technology out. "What
our goal has been is (to) remove that boundary of a database," Halevy
said. "If I develop a database table today and you develop a database
table, and (then) we discover a few months later that they
are actually related to each other, then lets make it very, very easy
for us to fuse the data from these two tables.
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