Demonstration of VegaPlus: Optimizing Declarative Visualization Languages

TL;DR

This paper introduces VegaPlus, a system that optimizes declarative visualization languages by offloading heavy computations to a database, enabling efficient visualization of large-scale data with live programming and performance comparison features.

Contribution

VegaPlus is a novel system that automatically optimizes visualization execution plans for large data by integrating with a DBMS and providing live programming and performance analysis tools.

Findings

Effective offloading of computations improves visualization performance at scale.

Users can interactively modify and compare visualization plans in real-time.

The system demonstrates significant performance gains over traditional client-side approaches.

Abstract

While many visualization specification languages are user-friendly, they tend to have one critical drawback: they are designed for small data on the client-side and, as a result, perform poorly at scale. We propose a system that takes declarative visualization specifications as input and automatically optimizes the resulting visualization execution plans by offloading computational-intensive operations to a separate database management system (DBMS). Our demo emphasizes live programming of visualizations over big data, enabling users to write or import Vega specifications, view the optimized plans from our system, and even modify these plans and compare their performance via a dedicated performance dashboard.