It's a shame, but not a surprise. I used to teach Fusion Tables to journalists [0] as a gateway into the power of SQL/relationships. The merge functionality was

It's a shame, but not a surprise. I used to teach Fusion Tables to journalists [0] as a gateway into the power of SQL/relationships. The merge functionality was an effective if watered-down version of a proper SQL join, but it got the point across in a way that VLOOKUP couldn't. But Fusion Tables's killer function was its integration with Google Maps. For novice users who couldn't build a simple HTML page to to save their lives, Fusion Tables was an incredible way to create a powerful interactive with data. I stopped teaching FT because several years ago because it seemed clear, in an implicit way, that it wasn't getting the traction. I hardly ever heard anyone inside or outside of Google talk/tweet/etc about it, in the same way people do for Sheets or BigQuery. I missed the easy data-to-interactive-map workflow for teaching, but for production work, FT was just too clunky (and merge far too limited compared to a SQL join) to justify using as a data store. [0] http://www.smalldatajournalism.com/projects/one-offs/mapping-with-fusion-tables/ http://www.smalldatajournalism.com/projects/one-offs/mapping...