HIERARCHICAL GRAPH TECHNIQUES APPLIED TO DATABASE VISUALIZATION

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