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Oracle Beware — Google Tests Cloud-Based Database
narramissic writes "On Tuesday, the same day Google held a press event to launch its Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, the company quietly announced in its research team blog a new online database called Fusion Tables. Under the hood of Fusion Tables is data-spaces technology, which would 'allow Google to add to the conventional two-dimensional database tables a third coordinate with elements like product reviews, blog posts, Twitter messages and the like, as well as a fourth dimension of real-time updates,' according to Stephen E. Arnold, a technology and financial analyst. 'So now we have an n-cube, a four-dimensional space, and in that space we can now do new kinds of queries which create new kinds of products and new market opportunities,' said Arnold, whose research about this topic includes a study done for IDC last August. 'If you're IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, your worst nightmare is now visible.'"
Will they do no evil as they scan every data element on the planet?
Linux just isn't ready for the cloud-based database yet. It may be ready for the web servers that you nerds use to distribute your TRON fanzines and personal Dungeons and Dragons web-sights across the world wide web, but the average database administrator isn't going to spend months learning how to use a CLI and then hours compiling packages so that they can get a workable graphic interface to check their databases with, especially not when they already have a Windows machine with OracleDB that does its job perfectly well and is backed by a major corporation, as opposed to Linux which is only supported by a few unemployed nerds living in their mother's basement somewhere. The last thing I want is a level 5 dwarf (haha) providing me my OS.
Why does this post show up as red to me?
How's this three dimensional stuff not just plain old OLAP?
Are you adequate?
'If you're IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, your worst nightmare is now visible.'
I didn't realize they had merged.
I'm coming out with a five-dimensional database.
-Taylor
Worldwide Military budgets: $2100 billion. Worldwide Space Exploration budgets: $38 billion. Really, world? Really?
I like how the word "mdash" is in the URL.
I don't get it. Relational databases are deficient, because they need twitter posts and the FOURTH DIMENSION of being able to update and insert data?
I'm interested in how this is going to further web development and online collaboration.
It seems to be a wiki like simplified database.
"'If you're IBM, Microsoft and Oracle, your worst nightmare is now visible.'"
Like I would EVER trust a company to store my data, let alone touch it. The life's blood of my company.
Really? It probably threatens slashdot's business model more than it does corporate IT vendors. Imagine a new mash up that delivers all the content of slashdot without any of the ads nor the frequent fiddling with message filter UIs.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Twitter coordinates, n-Cubes, and four-dimensional spaces... in a cloud?
Gee... I'm glad it's not possible to die from a hype overdose.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
What company in their right mind is going to upload the crown jewels into someone else's computer?
Unless you add fifth dimensional monkeys, you just aren't cool anymore.
Looking over the actual Google blog announcement, this looks more like a case of the F article getting it all wrong. The "dimensionality" stuff is clearly not intended to be the innovation or selling point of Google's service; much less a differentiator relative to database vendors, who've had OLAP for ages.
The real selling points seem to be an easy UI, a lot of predefined public data sets available to combine and correlate with your own data, and the collaboration features.
Are you adequate?
Before long we'll be using them in queries I suppose...
I have a funny feeling Oracle, DB2, and MS SQL executives aren't exactly quivering in abject terror at the idea of a database with "a third coordinate with elements like product reviews, blog posts, Twitter messages and the like."
"Real time updates" are a new feature (and a "fourth dimension")? That's news to me... I thought batch-only updates went out with punchcards.
I'm pretty sure this Google thing has some interesting features, but I am equally sure that it has nothing to do with the buzzword-stuff from that marketing drone/"IT Consultant."
SirWired
Google adds Joins?
be afraid of cloud computing? What corporation in their right mind would EVER put valuable company information on the internet? What happens when your internet connection goes down? What happens when someone breaks in and takes whatever data you have (or worse, takes it and deletes the original data). I can't see how this could POSSIBLY be a good idea for any corporate entity.
The same goes for the "cloud" that google has consisting of googledocs. Why would any corporate entity (or home user?) want to rely upon internet based data storage for valuable documents?
Although clouds are the hot topic right now they are nothing new. The concept as been around since the 1960s with the timesharing model. Clouds are definitely the thing of the future, and cloud security is going along with that trend. It is not that clouds can't be secured like any other network, it is that they can't be tested as easily as every other network. I mean other companies are working on cloud storage as well, the big one being EMC with Atmos. It is an intriguing concept, but get the cloud secure enough to put confidential information in it will be the deal breaker.
Just because you are wrong and I called you out on it doesn't mean I am a Troll.
The marketing speak and abuse of the term "dimensions" in TFS is entirely unhelpful as to what "dataspaces" are about. The pre-alpha release of Fusion Tables now available has pretty limited (though interesting) functionality; a broader picture of what "dataspaces" are about is available in this paper, which is probably more useful to the technically- (rather than marketing-) oriented crowd on Slashdot.
Of particular note, a "DataSpace Support Platform" (DSSP) is not a replacement for RDBMSs, but instead something that fits a different role and provides a common interface for data stored in heterogenous underlying storage systems, some of which could be RDBMSs. Its true that some RDBMSs do provide some features along these lines, but they aren't the principal strength of RDBMSs.
This is an awful article. Sadly it takes away from what could be a pretty useful competitor to MS Access. http://realjavasoa.blogspot.com/2009/06/google-fusion-tables-vs-oracle-duh.html
Dataspaces (ignoring the hype explosion) has nothing to do with relational database or SQL bashing; it fills a different role than RDBMSs; a particular purposes of "Dataspaces" is to unify access to heterogenous collections of data, including the case where some of the underlying data is held in RDBMSs, as is apparent from the paper describing them.
The pre-alpha implementation here doesn't seem to do much of that; it requires importing fairly simple tabular data into its internal datastore, and doesn't seem to do much to unify diverse underlying datastores, but given the technology that Google says its based on, one presumes that that's the future goal of Fusion Tables, and that the current version mostly is a demonstration of some what you will be able to do on the front-end given the existence of the right back-end data. The really interesting part will come if and when they support back-end data other than stuff exported into there internal servers in CSV/XLS format, particularly, linking to externally-stored and maintained data. And, for that matter, when they can support aggregation and calculation rather than just simple filtering and joins.
Nearly 100% of the pundits commenting on this story are as ignorant as the submitter. This is significant news and it's extremely problematic for a large number of industry stalwarts. That the submitter had no clue and over-hyped the wrong points is besides the point... and on par for a Slashdot submission.
Thank God Paper tape is still in!
From this article, I couldn't tell, but my real interest is in how Google does massively distributed in-memory databases. That is the technology I'm most interested in. I don't really care so much about the other stuff. Is this what Google runs? Or just an academic side project?
Well I'm glad you've cleared that up. The argument you've made along with the supporting facts are irrefutable!
What the hell were you yammering about again?
http://www.geocities.com/tablizer/dynrelat.htm
I think they have just provided the final step for the time-cube solution to start the chain reaction that will end the earth. Ignore Cubic Math at your own peril, and of humanity.
You can't handle the truth.
for all Tables add new column("product reviews, blog posts, Twitter messages and the like");
"and in that space we can now do new kinds of queries which create new kinds of products and new market opportunities"
I'd love to see the query that creates new products and market opportunities.
In other words, Google is yet another organization jumping on the tensor mining bandwagon prior to assessing its merits and pitfalls? If they're using the same algorithms I think they're using, Google is going to have a heck of a time with the efficiency, considering the scale of their dataset. The 502 error I get when I attempt to access it isn't encouraging either.
Referential integrity will always matter with databases or else they're not databases, they're mashups. If you let anybody play with the structure of the data, you lose integrity and the ability for programmers to do anything significant in visual abstraction. If you don't let anybody play with the structure of the data you don't have a mashup, you just have another sort of database.
What everybody has been assuming here is that the creators and consumers of the data are the same people. As soon as they are not, you need very strict rules governing the meaning of the data, or there's no 'BI' to it. It's just everybody's interpretation of anybody's data. Which is what search is now. The point of BI is to make the few rational conclusions implicit in the data unambiguously evident to whomever sees it. You cannot do that without structure from the beginning to the end of the data supply chain.
Think forensics. Think WMD inspections. Think admissible evidence. If it's not structured it's not intelligence. You cannot structure anything without referential integrity.
This is a world wide, shared, annotated database with easy ways to join to other data and visualization tools built-in. Kudos to Google for implementing this.
Apart from the monetization possibilities (of which there are plenty), you can now crowdsource datagathering easier than ever before.
Also, databases can be pretty difficult to add to webpages (for consumers) because you need to know a few things about SQL etc. - it looks like this could provide structured data storage to more websites than ever before.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)