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Google Fusion Tables
June 9, 2009
Posted by Alon Halevy, Google Research and Rebecca Shapley, User Experience
Quick links
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.
Today we're introducing Google Fusion Tables on Labs, an experimental system for data management in the cloud. It draws on the expertise of folks within Google Research who have been studying collaboration, data integration, and user requirements from a variety of domains. Fusion Tables is not a traditional database system focusing on complicated SQL queries and transaction processing. Instead, the focus is on fusing data management and collaboration: merging multiple data sources, discussion of the data, querying, visualization, and Web publishing. We plan to iteratively add new features to the systems as we get feedback from users.
In the version we're launching today, you can upload tabular data sets (right now, we're supporting up to 100 MB per data set, 250 MB of data per user) and share them with your collaborators or with the world. You can choose to share all of your data with your collaborators, or keep parts of it hidden. You can even share different portions of your data with different collaborators.
When you edit the data in place, your collaborators always get the latest version. The attribution feature means your data will get credit for its contribution to any data set built with it. And yes, you can export your data back out of the cloud as CSV files.
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We hope you find Fusion Tables useful. As usual with first releases, we realize there is much missing, and we look forward to hearing your feedback.