Graph-Based Relational Data Visualization

Abstract

Relational databases are rigid-structured data sources characterized by complex relationships among a set of relations (tables). Making sense of such relationships is a challenging problem because users must consider multiple relations, understand their ensemble of integrity constraints, interpret dozens of attributes, and draw complex SQL queries for each desired data exploration. In this scenario, we introduce a twofold methodology, we use a hierarchical graph representation to efficiently model the database relationships and, on top of it, we designed a visualization technique for rapidly relational exploration. Our results demonstrate that the exploration of databases is deeply simplified as the user is able to visually browse the data with little or no knowledge about its structure, dismissing the need for complex SQL queries. We believe our findings will bring a novel paradigm in what concerns relational data comprehension.