For data-driven organizations, improving data visualization has many potential benefits.
It can be challenging for data-driven organizations to make productive use of their vast information resources. Big data and the Internet of Things (IoT) have exponentially increased the volume of information available for assisting decision-makers.
This flood of data provides companies with new opportunities to better understand their business, customers, and market trends. But in many situations, the sheer amount of data available has made it more difficult to extract and communicate the information that is most important to the business. Data visualization can help alleviate those difficulties.
What is Data Visualization?
Techopedia defines data visualization as the process of displaying data or information in graphical charts, figures, and bars. It is used to visually report on the performance, operations, or general statistics of an application, network, hardware component, or virtually any IT asset. This includes the wide array of databases that store enterprise data resources.
Data visualization is a technique that enables complex information to be presented in a format more easily comprehensible to a wide range of technical and non-technical stakeholders. Complicated interactions between data elements can be presented with the creation of graphs and dashboards that highlight pertinent information. Irrelevant data can be hidden or excluded from the visualization making it effective in providing the information required by corporate decision-makers.
Visualizations are not only valuable for a non-technical audience. Technical teams can also benefit from visually representing the information necessary to ensure system performance and availability. Monitoring dashboards enable administrators to quickly evaluate the state of their systems, identify problems, and take the necessary actions to avoid outages or performance hits.
Why Does Data Visualization Work?
The reason data visualization is an effective and efficient method of communication is due to the nature of the human brain. This ability to rapidly process visual data probably had a lot to do with our ascension to the top of the evolutionary ladder.
Following are some of the specific aspects of the human brain that make data visualization such a powerful tool.
- Half of the human brain is used to process visual information. The physical construction of the brain includes two optic nerves that each have a million fibers. In comparison, auditory nerves only carry 30,000 fibers.
- The brain has been shown to have the ability to recognize and identify images seen for only 13 milliseconds.
- Research has shown that upwards of 65% of the population can be categorized as visual learners. So there are probably more than a few in your intended audience.
- Humans remember pictures and images much more efficiently than they can recall words. The adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” may undersell the benefits of seeing an image rather than hearing about it.
- Presentations that make use of visual aids are significantly more persuasive than those that do not. The visual aids impart a perceptive of the presenter as having a better grasp of the material and making productive use of supporting data. They also contribute to making a presentation more interesting for the audience.
Addressing the intrinsic preference for visualization built into our anatomy is, excuse me, a no-brainer. So the question then becomes how to turn enterprise data stores into viable visualizations. It’s a matter of using the right tools.
A Flexible Tool for Creating Data Visualizations
Aqua Data Studio is a comprehensive tool designed for use by administrators and developers faced with supporting multi-platform database environments. The application supports over 40 relational and NoSQL database management platforms including SQL Server, Oracle, MongoDB, Snowflake, MySQL, and many others.
Aqua Data Studio offers database teams an integrated development environment (IDE) from which to work with the supported database platforms from a unified interface. This simplifies the daily life of the support staff and increases productivity by focusing on a single tool. The application can be installed on Windows Linux, or macOS machines affording flexible deployment options.
There are extensive analytics features designed to provide the building blocks to create eye-catching visualizations. Some of the features focused on performing visual analytics and developing data visualizations include:
- The ability to drag and drop datasets to create visualizations using filters, calculations, and interactive controls;
- Calculated fields and table calculations;
- Combination charts within a single worksheet to provide different views for specific data series;
- The ability to create customized dashboards that allow interaction with your visualizations.
Organizations can start developing visualizations without the need to learn a proprietary scripting language, as in some other visualization tools. Aqua Data Studio uses SQL as its scripting language when creating visualizations which will reduce the learning curve for members of the database team.
With Aqua Data Studio, you can harness the power of data visualization across a multi-platform environment and create informative presentations geared to any audience. You can try Aqua Data Studio with a free 14-day trial to discover how it can bring your data to life and assist in developing more effective presentations.