Google fuses SQL, Python, and Spark in Colab Enterprise push

Google is promising a single notebook environment for machine learning and data analytics, integrating SQL, Python, and Apache Spark in one place.

Readers might note that other prominent vendors in the data science and analytics market have also tried to tackle the schism between SQL/analytics and the machine learning workbench.

Yasmeen Ahmad, managing director, Google Data Cloud, said that the greatest barrier to productivity in data science was switching between database/data warehouse environments to get data with SQL code, only to export and load it into a Python notebook to do machine learning, while configuring a separate Spark cluster. They might then switch to a BI tool just to visualize results, she said.

"Our priority is to eliminate this friction by creating the single, intelligent environment an architect needs to engineer, build, and deploy – not just run predictive models."

Google is therefore previewing a number of enhancements to ...