Database System Support for Data Visualization

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One picture is worth a thousand words. The idea of replacing*a complex narrative with a single image may have become a cliché in journalism,*but it is an absolute requirement in data exploration. After all, one may be*able to read a thousand words, but cannot possibly look at, let alone*understand, a billion data points. Visualization offers an indispensable tool*in understanding the data. ***The*process of data visualization can be described from a high-level perspective as*consisting of two steps: processing the data, then applying one of the*visualization algorithms to it. There has been significant work done on data*visualization over the last 50 years. Interestingly, most of this work*concentrated on the second step of the visualization process. This was*understandable, as data sets were relatively small and the performance of the*visualization tools was often determined by the efficiency of the graphics*algorithms. With the advent of large data sets a radical shift in the design of*data visualization tools has to be made. Data retrieval and processing time now*dominates the performance of the visualization process, so cannot be ignored.*Without efficient database support, visualization, in particular, interactive*visualization is impossible. ***The research program we propose addresses this very problem. We*will look into different visualization techniques over different types of data*and analyze the performance of the data processing engine that pre-processes*data to be visualized. We will offer new data processing techniques to improve*the performance of the back-end system and integrate them with the front-end*visualization step. We expect to build prototypes of such systems and*demonstrate experimentally their viability.