Google Fusion Tables, Data Management in the Cloud

Google is expanding its line of cloud-based applications and, today, it is introducing Google Fusion Labs, a web app designed for data management and collaboration. The app aims to make working, sharing and collaborating on data sets easier by providing a set of tools to keep the data in sync and available to all the users involved.

“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,” the post on the Official Google blog reads.

Google Fusion Tables is being introduced on Google Labs for now, as it's still in an experimental state. The new system doesn't aim to replace traditional, complex SQL databases, but to offer a simpler alternative by “fusing” usual data management with collaboration tools. For now, users can add multiple data sets, discuss on them, as well as make queries and view the data with different visualizations. Being a Google app Web publishing is, of course, an important component.

Users will be able to upload tabular data sets as big as 100 MB and up to 250 MB of data per user. Those data sets or a portion of them can be shared with other users and different individuals can have different access to them. The service keeps track of edits, so the data will always be in sync and it can also be exported as a CVS file.

Fusion Tables offers a variety of visualizations based on the Google Visualization API, for example you can view your data on Google Maps if it applies. The app is already available on Google Labs and the team plans to add more features in the future based on user feedback.