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Google Cloud SQL is web service that allows you to create, configure, and use relational databases with your App Engine applications. It is a fully-managed service that maintains, manages, and administers your databases, allowing you to focus on your applications and services.
By offering the capabilities of a MySQL database, the service enables you to easily move your data, applications, and services into and out of the cloud. This allows for high data portability and helps in faster time-to-market because you can quickly leverage your existing database (using JDBC and/or DB-API) in your App Engine application.
Here is where you can get an invite to the beta only Google Cloud SQL
Sign up for Limited Preview
Google Cloud SQL is available to a limited number of users. To sign up for the service:
1. There are three kinds of instances in the beta view
2. Wait for the Instance to be created note- the Design of the Interface uptil now is much better than Amazon’s.
Note you need to have an appspot application from Google Apps and can choose between the Python and Java versions. Quite clearly there is a play for other languages too. I think GO is also supported.
3. You can import your data from your Google Storage bucket
4. I am not that hot at coding or maybe the interface was too pretty. Anyways- the log tells me that import of the text file has failed from Google Storage to Google Cloud SQL
5. Incidentally the Google Cloud Storage interface is also much better than the Amazon GUI for transferring data- Note I was using the classical statistical dataset Boston Housing Data as the test case.
6. The SQL prompt is the weakest part of the design process of the Interphase. There is no Query builder and the SELECT FROM WHERE prompt is slightly amusing/ insulting . I mean guys either throw in a fully fledged GUI for query builder similar to the MYSQL Workbench , than create a pretty white command prompt.
7. You can also export your data back to your Google Storage bucket
These are early days, and I am trying to see if there is a play for some cloud kind of ODBC action between R, Prediction API , and the cloud SQL… so try it out yourself at http://code.google.com/apis/sql/ and see if there is any juice you can build here.
Unlike Android and other free stuff these APIs are very promising for revenue generation as some of them are very unique to Google itself, and already some are being offered on a Pricing Tier. There are 18 APIs in total with 3 APIs having Pricing while the rest are in beta stages.
When the biggest cloud computing company in the world announces a phased rollout to a product- we wonder if they are really sure on launching the product rollout or just were in a hurry again.
Machine learning wont work with social , chaps. Well not everything in social. And the Google Social Blog forgot to write about it http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/
Well anyways, even Google Finance’s automated announcements feed failed to pick many of their own product launches (or it does in an automated manner depending on which time period you choose – yes still no social buttons up http://www.google.com/finance?q=google
Thanks for stopping by.We’re still ironing out a few kinks in Google+, so it’s not quite ready for everyone to climb aboard. But, if you want, we’ll let you know the minute the doors are open for real. Cool? Cool.
2) Google Web Fonts- Great product, how and hey http://googlewebfonts.blogspot.com/ when do you plan to monetize uhm web fonts. Not that would be awesome. Not even a single ad on those pages- not even for philanthropy. or poor poets. or even Google Book Authors who self publish . Sound of silence….
3) Google Analytics gets some groove back. I really want to see much better integration of Google Apps and Google Analytics and Google Desktop search. Ditto for the interface. Enterprise software uses different fonts than retail software, dude. More fries, http://analytics.blogspot.com/ ?
Feature 1- Custom Reports for metrics I can slice and dice on my own
Feature 2 Awesome analytics for In-Page Analytics (beta feature) Beta is boring if overused. Try Theta maybe?
Feature 3 Daily Automated Alerts for Unusual Server /Traffic Activity
Feature 4 event Tracking is cool esp for understanding social media impact
It is still too early for mobile (in terms of traffic) as well as tablet analytics (?)
There are ways to make software that are not evil. Very very disappointed at total lack of monetization of this chrome app. Not even a T Shirt for me to buy ad . sighs
Funny thing- the product manager forgot to take off Facebook like button or even add the +1 button or even the Tweet this button.
To help unify and uniform, collobrative work and data management and business models across the enterprise in secure SSL cloud environments- Google Storage has been rolling out some changes (read below)-this also gives you more options on the day Amazon goes ahem down (cough cough) because they didn’t think someone in their data environment could be sympathetic to free data.
We’re making some changes to Google Storage for Developers to make team-based development easier. As part of this work, we are introducing the concept of a project. In preparation for this feature, we will be creating projects for every user and migrating their buckets to it.
What does this mean for you?
Everything will continue to work as it always has. However, you will notice that if you perform a get-acl operation on any of your buckets, you will see extra ACL entries. These entries correspond to project groups. Each group has only one member – the person who owned the buckets before the bucket migration; no additional rights have been granted to any of your buckets or objects. You should preserve these new ACL grants if you modify bucket ACLs.
An example entry for a modified ACL would look like this:
We’ll be rolling out these changes over the next few days,
Google Storage for Developers is a RESTful service for storing and accessing your data on Google’s infrastructure. The service combines the performance and scalability of Google’s cloud with advanced security and sharing capabilities. Highlights include:
Fast, scalable, highly available object store
All data replicated to multiple U.S. data centers
Read-your-writes data consistency
Objects of hundreds of gigabytes in size per request with range-get support
Domain-scoped bucket namespace
Easy, flexible authentication and sharing
Key-based authentication
Authenticated downloads from a web browser
Individual- and group-level access controls
In addition, Google Storage for Developers offers a web-based interface for managing your storage and GSUtil, an open source command line tool and library. The service is also compatible with many existing cloud storage tools and libraries. With pay-as-you-go pricing, it’s easy to get started and scale as your needs grow.
Google Storage for Developers is currently only available to a limited number of developers. Please sign up to join the waiting list.
Here is a short list of resources and material I put together as starting points for R and Cloud Computing It’s a bit messy but overall should serve quite comprehensively.
Cloud computing is a commonly used expression to imply a generational change in computing from desktop-servers to remote and massive computing connections,shared computers, enabled by high bandwidth across the internet.
As per the National Institute of Standards and Technology Definition,
Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.
Rweb is developed and maintained by Jeff Banfield. The Rweb Home Page provides access to all three versions of Rweb—a simple text entry form that returns output and graphs, a more sophisticated JavaScript version that provides a multiple window environment, and a set of point and click modules that are useful for introductory statistics courses and require no knowledge of the R language. All of the Rweb versions can analyze Web accessible datasets if a URL is provided.
The paper “Rweb: Web-based Statistical Analysis”, providing a detailed explanation of the different versions of Rweb and an overview of how Rweb works, was published in the Journal of Statistical Software (http://www.jstatsoft.org/v04/i01/).
Ulf Bartel has developed R-Online, a simple on-line programming environment for R which intends to make the first steps in statistical programming with R (especially with time series) as easy as possible. There is no need for a local installation since the only requirement for the user is a JavaScript capable browser. See http://osvisions.com/r-online/ for more information.
Rcgi is a CGI WWW interface to R by MJ Ray. It had the ability to use “embedded code”: you could mix user input and code, allowing the HTMLauthor to do anything from load in data sets to enter most of the commands for users without writing CGI scripts. Graphical output was possible in PostScript or GIF formats and the executed code was presented to the user for revision. However, it is not clear if the project is still active.
Currently, a modified version of Rcgi by Mai Zhou (actually, two versions: one with (bitmap) graphics and one without) as well as the original code are available from http://www.ms.uky.edu/~statweb/.
David Firth has written CGIwithR, an R add-on package available from CRAN. It provides some simple extensions to R to facilitate running R scripts through the CGI interface to a web server, and allows submission of data using both GET and POST methods. It is easily installed using Apache under Linux and in principle should run on any platform that supports R and a web server provided that the installer has the necessary security permissions. David’s paper “CGIwithR: Facilities for Processing Web Forms Using R” was published in the Journal of Statistical Software (http://www.jstatsoft.org/v08/i10/). The package is now maintained by Duncan Temple Lang and has a web page athttp://www.omegahat.org/CGIwithR/.
Rpad, developed and actively maintained by Tom Short, provides a sophisticated environment which combines some of the features of the previous approaches with quite a bit of JavaScript, allowing for a GUI-like behavior (with sortable tables, clickable graphics, editable output), etc.
Jeff Horner is working on the R/Apache Integration Project which embeds the R interpreter inside Apache 2 (and beyond). A tutorial and presentation are available from the project web page at http://biostat.mc.vanderbilt.edu/twiki/bin/view/Main/RApacheProject.
Rserve is a project actively developed by Simon Urbanek. It implements a TCP/IP server which allows other programs to use facilities of R. Clients are available from the web site for Java and C++ (and could be written for other languages that support TCP/IP sockets).
OpenStatServer is being developed by a team lead by Greg Warnes; it aims “to provide clean access to computational modules defined in a variety of computational environments (R, SAS, Matlab, etc) via a single well-defined client interface” and to turn computational services into web services.
Two projects use PHP to provide a web interface to R. R_PHP_Online by Steve Chen (though it is unclear if this project is still active) is somewhat similar to the above Rcgi and Rweb. R-php is actively developed by Alfredo Pontillo and Angelo Mineo and provides both a web interface to R and a set of pre-specified analyses that need no R code input.
webbioc is “an integrated web interface for doing microarray analysis using several of the Bioconductor packages” and is designed to be installed at local sites as a shared computing resource.
Rwui is a web application to create user-friendly web interfaces for R scripts. All code for the web interface is created automatically. There is no need for the user to do any extra scripting or learn any new scripting techniques. Rwui can also be found at http://rwui.cryst.bbk.ac.uk.
Finally, the R.rsp package by Henrik Bengtsson introduces “R Server Pages”. Analogous to Java Server Pages, an R server page is typically HTMLwith embedded R code that gets evaluated when the page is requested. The package includes an internal cross-platform HTTP server implemented in Tcl, so provides a good framework for including web-based user interfaces in packages. The approach is similar to the use of the brew package withRapache with the advantage of cross-platform support and easy installation.
Remote access to R/Bioconductor on EBI’s 64-bit Linux Cluster
Start the workbench by downloading the package for your operating system (Macintosh or Windows), or via Java Web Start, and you will get access to an instance of R running on one of EBI’s powerful machines. You can install additional packages, upload your own data, work with graphics and collaborate with colleagues, all as if you are running R locally, but unlimited by your machine’s memory, processor or data storage capacity.
Most up-to-date R version built for multicore CPUs
Access to all Bioconductor packages
Access to our computing infrastructure
Fast access to data stored in EBI’s repositories (e.g., public microarray data in ArrayExpress)
Using R Google Docs http://www.omegahat.org/RGoogleDocs/run.pdf
It uses the XML and RCurl packages and illustrates that it is relatively quick and easy
to use their primitives to interact with Web services.
Amazon’s EC2 is a type of cloud that provides on demand computing infrastructures called an Amazon Machine Images or AMIs. In general, these types of cloud provide several benefits:
Simple and convenient to use. An AMI contains your applications, libraries, data and all associated configuration settings. You simply access it. You don’t need to configure it. This applies not only to applications like R, but also can include any third-party data that you require.
On-demand availability. AMIs are available over the Internet whenever you need them. You can configure the AMIs yourself without involving the service provider. You don’t need to order any hardware and set it up.
Elastic access. With elastic access, you can rapidly provision and access the additional resources you need. Again, no human intervention from the service provider is required. This type of elastic capacity can be used to handle surge requirements when you might need many machines for a short time in order to complete a computation.
Pay per use. The cost of 1 AMI for 100 hours and 100 AMI for 1 hour is the same. With pay per use pricing, which is sometimes called utility pricing, you simply pay for the resources that you use.
#This example requires you had previously created a bucket named data_language on your Google Storage and you had uploaded a CSV file named language_id.txt (your data) into this bucket – see for details
library(predictionapirwrapper)
Elastic-R is a new portal built using the Biocep-R platform. It enables statisticians, computational scientists, financial analysts, educators and students to use cloud resources seamlessly; to work with R engines and use their full capabilities from within simple browsers; to collaborate, share and reuse functions, algorithms, user interfaces, R sessions, servers; and to perform elastic distributed computing with any number of virtual machines to solve computationally intensive problems.
Also see Karim Chine’s http://biocep-distrib.r-forge.r-project.org/
R for Salesforce.com
At the point of writing this, there seem to be zero R based apps on Salesforce.com This could be a big opportunity for developers as both Apex and R have similar structures Developers could write free code in R and charge for their translated version in Apex on Salesforce.com
Force.com and Salesforce have many (1009) apps at http://sites.force.com/appexchange/home for cloud computing for
businesses, but very few forecasting and statistical simulation apps.
These are like iPhone apps except meant for business purposes (I am
unaware if any university is offering salesforce.com integration
though google apps and amazon related research seems to be on)
Personal Note-Mentioning SAS in an email to a R list is a big no-no in terms of getting a response and love. Same for being careless about which R help list to email (like R devel or R packages or R help)
DECISION STATS 