One of the most amazing pieces of software I've worked with recently is Kibana, which is a web-based visualization software that is part of the open-source Elasticsearch stack.

My understanding of why Kibana could be built and become such a powerful visualization tool is because of the easy-to-use and powerful REST APIs that Elasticsearch shipped with out of the box.

Hopefully a REST API like this for MySQL will make it easy to build similar powerful tools around MySQL! It's definitely something that would have helped with the PHP / MySQL applications I built years ago.