Google Fusion Tables Takedown: What It Means for Users

Google recently announced that, on December 3, 2019, their experimental products Google Fusion Tables and the Fusion Tables API will be turned down. Continue reading for information about the tools that will replace Fusion Tables, and what to do if you’ve been using Fusion Tables to gather, visualize, or share your data.

Since Google Fusion Tables was created, almost a decade ago, several other Google products that provide similar functions and services as Fusion Tables have been created. Fusion Tables was created as a platform for gathering, visualizing, and sharing tabular data. The flexibility that the product afforded its users through its aggregated functions will be available through different, more specific Google tools.

Google BigQuery is a cloud-storage-based data warehouse for data analytics that will also have machine-learning functionality. The tool can be extended for use with geospatial data, through BigQuery GIS.

Google Cloud SQL is a cloud-based tool for creating, maintaining, managing, and administering relational MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. The developers at Google have provided an example of using Google Cloud SQL, through a tutorial, “Using SQL and PHP with Google Maps.

As always, you can use Google Sheets as a tool for importing your Fusion Tables. Another cloud-based product, Google Sheets provides many of the same functions as Excel, and allows users to filter, script, and create charts and visualizations from the data stored in Sheets. We recommend that the faculty, staff, researchers, and students of UW-Madison use UW G Suite, a collection of Google’s collaborative tools. The UW-Madison community benefits from unlimited storage, and protection of intellectual property and individual privacy rights.

Google Data Studio is a free business intelligence tool that allows users to visualize data and create interactive dashboards and reports of data. Like other Google tools, Data Studio was created for easier sharing and collaborating with colleagues, and it is interoperable with other Google tools, like BigQuery and Sheets (in addition to over 500 other data sources!). It also includes a GUI for creating map visualizations.

If you have been using Google Fusion Tables to work with and visualize your data, you should refer to these instructions for obtaining your data before December 2019. Beginning in March 2019, Google will begin providing a Google Takeout tool for creating an archive of any data you may have from Google tools.

Though Google is providing these options for recovering your data from Fusion Tables, we always recommend that you do not rely on one storage option for your data. Check out our information about storing and backing up your data, and contact us if you have any questions!