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.