Visual output in Vertica

Joanna_Kossakow

Is it possible to get any visual output from Vertica? For example with use of R graphics. I have not find anything about it in the documentation so far.

[Deleted User]

Unfortunately, the official answer is currently "no." If you want to get graphics with R, the recommendation is that you use R to write the graphics to an image file, then copy the image file to your computer and open it. You can write R code on the server that processes your data and returns it to Vertica; then more R code on your computer that reads the data from Vertica via RODBC and displays it. But that's a two-step process. Unofficially, I think it's not strictly impossible to get this to work. I've never done it myself. It would certainly be totally unsupported and requiring a fair bit of Linux wizardry. But it'd be really cool if someone figured it out and posted a recipe :-) The principle is, you have to pass the credentials and connection information for your X server to Vertica by setting environment variables when Vertica is started, or as part of your R code, etc. (This becomes very tricky if you have a multi-user multi-computer Vertica cluster. But the single-computer case shouldn't be too bad, if you've worked with X-Windows at this level...) Again, never tested, completely unsupported. But it'd be really cool :-)

Daniel_Leybovic

Hi!


I don't think that question is correct: what does it mean "to get any visual output"? Does output is sound, Morse alphabet or what? Or "visual output" it is graphs? So also incorrect question: what kind of graph - pie, bars, lines,...? Vertica is database, so it goal - to store and to fetch data in optimal way, but not to visualize, it's  BI  tools should do.

BTW: some db clients like dbVisualizer can visualize a simple data set and as I know Vertica's team did a special plugin for dbVisualizer.

But it'd be really cool if someone figured it out and posted a recipe :-)

My recipe:
I think that ipython + pandas is a good option: platform independent, portable, R-lang also can be used, notebooks can be saved and used after it, notebook supports for simple text markup, so simple reports can be generated.

Example of data plotting  with pandas:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=634G27BIVfk