Ask HN: What would you like visualized from databases you interact with? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What would you like visualized from databases you interact with?

5 pointswestoncb2 comments

It seems problematic that when working with databases the primary interface is terminal text output. I'm aware there are many options for getting nicely formatted displays of your tables etc. (e.g. with html and css), but it seems to me like it might be useful to visualize more than this. For instance, wouldn't it be useful if I could just grab my User with ID 23456, and see a tree display of all the data referenced by it, rather than trying to piece this together by looking at various tables? What about its evolution in time? Wouldn't it be useful to just have a slider so that I could watch the data in this tree at previous points in time, or to be able to step through changes that were applied to it?

I've done a bunch of work on a general data visualization system that I'm considering specializing for this—but I wonder if there are enough interesting useful things to visualize, and whether it's something other developers would easily recognize as valuable or if it would seem too foreign.

Any general thoughts on the subject? or particular things you run into regularly that would be useful to have a better visual representation of? Maybe it would be possible to specialize even further around particular (widely used) database-centric software?

Thanks!

> wouldn't it be useful if I could just grab my User with ID 23456, and see a tree display of all the data referenced by it, rather than trying to piece this together by looking at various tables? What about its evolution in time? Wouldn't it be useful to just have a slider so that I could watch the data in this tree at previous points in time, or to be able to step through changes that were applied to it?

This! Looking at the data as a tree of references, or the data itself being hierarchical, is usually the most intuitive way I visualise it in my head. Same for the time, looking at the visualisation changing with time should be the way to visualize data evolution. In my work we deal with a lot of navigation logs, and what I miss the most is the ability to eaily visualize the navigation of a user and all of its attributes in the time, or how he steps from page to page. Or to visualize how the page attributes change with time, or the whole tree of url levels and how it evolves. The most challenging thing about it IMHO is how to correcltly handle not only one instance in the visualization but many, say millions, without forcing the user to pre-aggregate and loose all the interesring details.

> The most challenging thing about it IMHO is how to correcltly handle not only one instance in the visualization but many, say millions, without forcing the user to pre-aggregate and loose all the interesring details.

I wasn't sure what you meant by pre-aggregate here. By 'instances' do you mean the states of the User data in time?

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