Building a product is an exhilarating experience; building a product for the smartest people on the planet is a whole ‘nother beast.

Over the last few months, everyone at Datazar has been on an accelerated learning experience. Most of it due to the fact that we were in an accelerator, but the rest was due to building a strong relationship with our users. We make sure we listen, and we listen very closely.

We started out by building the basics at Datazar, data hosting, data parsing, security etc… Now, we are extremely proud to introduce our Workspace — which includes R, SQL, LaTeX and Chat!

This means you can run your R and SQL scripts directly in the cloud using the datasets that are in your Datazar project! You don’t have to ever download datasets just so you can analyze them. While you’re doing all of this, you can chat with your research group and discuss methods, progress and much more.

R and SQL were amongst the highest requested languages in our platform. LaTeX we thought was a nice addition as we were not really concentrating on the later stages of the research process. Happy to say it’s very handy to a lot of people! Personally, I love LaTeX. It’s been around for so many years for a reason!

Now let me show you a quick guide on how to start these scripts in your Datazar project.

R

R is a technical computing language that is widely used in the academic and research fields. It can be run in a computer terminal or RStudio — a desktop program designed for R. Now, we’re happy to bring it to our cloud-based, research collaboration platform. By using it in Datazar, you directly analyze datasets online and see the results in real time.

SQL

SQL is a programming language designed to manage data in database. SQL is very famous in Web applications as it’s used as the backbone for most — if not all — the application data. It’s also very, very useful in preparing raw data for analysis. If your only aim is to run SQL statements from a CSV or table, you should not spend precious time launching a server instance, installing a database and all the fun stuff associated with those tasks.

LaTeX

LaTeX is one of those things that has been used for such a long time, that people forgot how to improve the experience. LaTeX is an extremely sophisticated tool. It might not be used by everyone, but the people who do use it cannot live without it. An extremely large portion of research papers, especially the math heavy ones are written using LaTeX. Doing it online is a huge relief.

Chat

Communication during a research project is one of the most important and difficult aspects. Teams spend hours in meetings and thousands of emails to stay on the same page during the lifetime of research project. Every step of the process, whether you’re in the data collection stage, the theory stage, the analysis stage or even the publication stage, submitting your final papers seems farther away each time. We’re extremely excited to introduce our Chat inside projects. Now, teams can communicate seamlessly and discuss matters of the research project while referring to all the necessary data and analysis files they have uploaded.

Conclusion

All of these new features are here to make the research experience as pleasant as possible. At Datazar, we always ask our selves one question — how do we make the research process so easy for researchers/scientists, that the only thing they worry about is the actual research and not the process?

Every day, every week and every month we revisit this question. What was done by unpaid grad students can now be handled by super easy collaboration and the power of the Web. After all, the Web was invented to make research data sharing as easy as possible.

Stay tuned, there’s a lot more to come. As always, feel free to shoot me an email or tweet.

R, SQL, LaTeX and Chat! was originally published in Datazar Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.