Google Fusion Tables
Google has announced an experimental cloud-based data management system called Fusion Tables. A press article and Slashdot thread ensued, based on some bizarre-sounding analyst quotes that I will not attempt to parse.
What Fusion Tables really seems to be is a spreadsheet without the formulae. That is, it’s a place to dump data in a grid of cells, comment on it, version it, and do elementary data manipulation. This could, I guess, be useful as an alternative to traditional RDBMS — assuming, of course, that you want to have a row-by-row debate about 100 megs of data.
Seriously, while Google Fusion Tables bears some vague resemblance to what I’m thinking about for the future of both business intelligence and data marts, it sounds as if it has a long way to go before it’s something most enterprises should spend time looking at.
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It is good to see that Google is finally entering the Data Visualization and Infographics space with Google Fusion. Data visualization is currently not available in the Google Apps platform. There are some 3rd party Google Docs gadgets for creating TreeMaps, Timelines, Pivot Tables, Maps and such, but nothing that is officially supported by Google.
There are many players in the consumer data visualization space – IBM Many Eyes, Chartle, Timetric, dabbledb, Microsoft Research Excel add-ins and others, but IBM Many Eyes is the best thus far. You can create amazing visualization with Many Eyes.
In time, I am sure Google will be a strong contender in this technology space, but they have a long way to go.