Archive for the ‘Google’ Category
Google Docs gets pivot tables
Not much to say, really, apart from the fact that you can now use pivot tables in Google Docs:
http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2011/05/summarize-your-data-with-pivot-tables.html
Yet another small step closer to Google having something resembling a BI solution… integrate Fusion Tables, Public Data Explorer, BigQuery and this and we’ll have something interesting, although I’m not convinced Google has a coherent BI strategy or thinks it needs one.
Google Public Data Explorer
Over the last few years I’ve been tracking Google’s slow progress towards offering a cloud-based BI solution. Here’s a new development: I see from the Official Google Blog that you can now upload your own data to the Google Public Data Explorer (which I blogged about last year):
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/visualize-your-own-data-in-google.html
There’s more background here:
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/02/dataviz-democratized-google-opens-public-data-explorer/
How long will it be before it can access data from BigQuery, and is integrated into Google Docs I wonder?
Google Docs can access data from BigQuery
I don’t know how I missed this news from last week (luckily I saw it relayed here), but this is important: Google have announced that you’ll be able to access data stored in BigQuery direct from Google Docs:
http://googledata.org/google-docs/bigquery-meet-google-spreadsheets/
I’ve been following BigQuery and Google’s BI efforts for a while, and it looks like it’s only a matter of time before they have something resembling a pivot table built into a Google Docs spreadsheet – and that would be a very significant development in the world of web-based BI. Think about it: vast amounts of data stored in BigQuery, accessible through a SQL-like interface and able to be queried very quickly; a spreadsheet on the front; all that’s needed is some kind of OLAP-like-layer in between to make it easy for end users to build their own queries. And Google have done similar things to what’s necessary here with Fusion Tables and their collaboration with Panorama.
Microsoft really need an answer to this. We know SSAS in the cloud is coming, and we have the Excel web app, but again we need pivot table support in the web app to complete the picture (see here and here for more discussion on this topic). I hope it comes soon!
Google Books Ngram Viewer
This has been blogged about quite a bit over the last few days, but if you’re looking to kill some time at work with something vaguely BI-related then take a look at Books Ngram Viewer, the latest thing on Google Labs:
It’s pretty simple: it allows you to visualise the number of occurrences of words in books held in Google books by year of publication, and therefore track the popularity of ideas and concepts over time (well, that’s the theory). You can even download the source data – if I’ve got some spare time it might be interesting to see this data in PowerPivot…!
There are already some interesting examples of things you can see with this data out there, for example on the Information Is Beautiful site, and on the Google Blog post announcing it. I can’t resist adding one more, though: Microsoft vs Oracle vs IBM vs Google – notice how IBM peaks in about 1988 then declines; Oracle and Microsoft have a similar peak in 2004 and then decline; while Google is still on the up…
Google Public Data Explorer
Google made yet another tentative step into the world of web-based BI with the launch of Public Data Explorer, a tool for analysing at least some of those public data sets that have been appearing thick and fast over the last year or so. Although it’s very fairly basic compared to other tools out there like (to pick two examples from many) Tableau Public or Timetric, it’s actually quite fun and much better than other Google efforts in this area like Fusion Tables. There’s a very limited number of data sets available at the moment and there aren’t many options for slicing and dicing, but the functionality that is there is quite slick – I especially like the way you can zoom in and out along the time dimension. Here’s a screenshot showing some European unemployment data:
Here’s a link to that analysis if you’d like to play with it yourself.
Of course, this will remain a toy until you can get more data into it: all the public data that’s available anywhere on the web, data that’s in Google spreadsheets, and maybe any data in more ‘difficult’ formats such as html tables in web pages (though that’s when you really need a complex tool like Kapow to extract it) or even any data that’s returned when you run a search (which Google has been doing to a limited extent for a year or so now; Public Data Explorer builds on this).
I’m surprised Wolfram Alpha hasn’t done something like this already; I wonder if Microsoft has something up its sleeve here too? After all it has a partnership with Wolfram Alpha to get data from there, and in Bing a search engine in search of differentiating features. Maybe Live Labs Pivot is part of the story? And given that it’s likely there’ll be some kind of cloud-based Analysis Services in the future, which I’m willing to bet would actually be more like a cloud-based PowerPivot and which will presumably work with Excel on the web, I can see Microsoft could have quite a strong story if it wanted. But this is all conjecture, of course. I wonder if there’s anyone on the Bing team who understands BI? No, I’m really making wild guesses now, so I think I’ll finish here…!
Google Fusion Tables
Well, well, well… another week, another BI-related announcement from Google. Jamie Thomson just brought my attention to Google Fusion Tables which got released this week with almost no fanfare (maybe Google wanted to avoid the kind of backlash they got with Google Squared?). Jamie’s first comment was pretty much inline with what I thought: this looks a lot like a basic version of Gemini, or indeed any other DIY BI tool. Basically you upload data, you can filter it, aggregate it, edit it and even join datasets together; then you can format the results as tables, maps, charts and so on and share the results with other people. You can find out more about how it works here:
http://tables.googlelabs.com/public/faq.html
http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2009/06/google-fusion-tables.html
So, even though I’ve got loads to do today I had to check it out, didn’t I? Google provide a number of different free datasets for you to play with, but I thought I’d have a go with some data about the hot topic of the moment here in the UK: MP’s expenses. This data is available in Google spreadsheet form – ideal for loading into Fusion Tables – from the Guardian data store site:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2009/may/08/mps-expenses-houseofcommons
After a bit of trial and error (and Fusion Tables is definitely prone to errors – although of course it is a beta) I managed to create a view that shows the average value of MP’s expense claims, excluding travel expenses, as a bar chart. I’m supposed to be able to share it here and I’ve got the HTML, but at the time of writing I can’t get the gadget to embed in this blog post. When I do, I’ll update this post to include it. In the meantime here’s a screenshot:
Nevertheless, it’s fun even if it’s not quite a useful business tool yet. But hmmm… is it just me or does Google have some kind of BI strategy?
UPDATE: this article has a little more detail on the technology behind it:
http://www.itworld.com/saas/69183/watch-out-oracle-google-tests-cloud-based-database
although I think it’s a bit premature to say that this is going to kill Oracle, Microsoft and IBM…
