Companies, organizations, and businesses are constantly churning out huge amounts of data that is far too diverse, fast-changing and massive in its raw form to make sense. The data needs to be presented in a simple, visually appealing manner in order to process the humongous amount of information for making business decisions.
The need for data visualization and its role in data analysis workflow is paramount. Data visualization is the front-end of modern business intelligence systems, empowering data analysts and managers to discover patterns in large datasets through graphical means, helping them represent the findings in a meaningful and effective way. Visualization is instrumental in inferring trends from data, spotting outliers and making sense of data-points. Someone has rightly said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Data visualization is an interdisciplinary field, which embodies the knowledge of design, web development, database management, and coding skills.
MongoDB is one of the most popular open-source, cross-platform document-oriented database available today. With JSON-like documents with dynamic schemas, it makes integration of data easier and faster. It has been widely deployed across a range of application portfolios of organizations and has integrated well with the existing processes and toolsets. This has resulted in better support from data analysts for businesses. They provide new insights from untapped data sources. Even database administrators and operations teams have easily been able to use MongoDB alongside existing relational databases, reducing expenditure on additional investment and skilling costs.
There are several GUI management tools to create meaningful and interactive data visualization using MongoDB. Some of the popular ones are:
- MongoVUE: This Windows desktop application gives an elegant and highly usable GUI to work with MongoDB.
- Cube: Built on MongoDB, Node, and D3, it is used to visualize time series data. One can easily create real-time visualizations of aggregate metrics for internal dashboards like monitoring website traffic.
- RockMongo: It is a powerful, browser-based MongoDB GUI tool. Written in PHP 5, RockMongo is quick and easy to use.
- DBHawk: Web-based MongoDB management tool
- RoboMongo: This shell-centric, cross-platform, open source MongoDB management tool offers a very powerful and intuitive Admin GUI.
- MongoHub: This is a popular MongoDB GUI application, simple enough to be used by users with no experience with MongoDB.