Interactive visualization of big data leveraging databases for scalable computation

Abstract

Modern database management systems (DBMS) have been designed to efficiently store, manage and perform computations on massive amounts of data. In contrast, many existing visualization systems do not scale seamlessly from small data sets to enormous ones. We have designed a three-tiered visualization system called ScalaR to deal with this issue. ScalaR dynamically performs resolution reduction when the expected result of a DBMS query is too large to be effectively rendered on existing screen real estate. Instead of running the original query, ScalaR inserts aggregation, sampling or filtering operations to reduce the size of the result. This thesis presents the design and implementation of ScalaR, and shows results for two example applications, visualizing earthquake records and satellite imagery data, stored in SciDB as the back-end DBMS.