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.'"

Re:Worst nightmare indeed

[Publikwerks]

You have to proactivly think outside the box to imagine the synergy that the 4-D database brings to the current paradyme

To be fair

[Estanislao Martínez]

Looking over the actual Google blog announcement [blogspot.com], this looks more like a case of the F article [itworld.com] 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.

Re:Um... what?

[AKAImBatman]

Because it packs more hype into an n-cube, and fills a 4-dimensional space with marketing.

That's why it's called a hype[r]cube. They'd call it a tesseract, but the reviewers kept asking how it helped with eye problems. ;-)

Joking aside, a cube is a data-mining/reporting concept that pre-computes a number of reporting relationships between data elements. Adding a "fourth-dimension" is usually what's referred to as a "slowly changing dimension". It's usually handled by adding time stamps denoting an active period for a record, then computing based on a time range.

I don't know if Google means the same thing here (probably not), but it sounds like the real breakthrough is a large-scale data space. Having worked with a few data space DBs, the concept lends itself well to the more organic nature of the Web. IMHO, it has the potential to succeed and offer a strong competitive advantage over traditional RDBMSes.

Today's RDBMSes are great, but the cost of adding new features to the application is extremely high. Data spaces sidestep the issue by allowing you to add data in whatever format you need. There are some rather obvious pitfalls (I can hear the DBAs screaming about data integrity already), but it matches the web development environment well. :-)

Re:Um... what?

[Estanislao Martínez]

Yeah, that's more or less what I figured after reading a bit more through stuff [slashdot.org]. The article Slashdot is sourcing this from is just clueless about what the real differentiating point is; it's not the fact that it's OLAP, it's the UI and integration with other Google or web data.

Re:Proprietary data?

[abigor]

Salesforce.com (crm), Taleo (hr), and various others like them are all successful. SAP is working on an online offering, I hear, and it may already be out there, I don't know. In short, lots and lots of companies offload various critical functions into the "cloud" (argh) if it makes sense to do so.

Security Issue

[gubers33]

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.