Informix Corp is to announce general availability of its Visionary data visualization tool at its Partner Forum meeting in Las Vegas this week. Informix first mentioned the tool last July when it moved into beta testing (CI No 3,459). Visionary is described by Informix’s chief technology officer, Dr Michael Stonebraker as a visual system for databases which requires no coding to produce front-end navigational applications for Informix Dynamic Server with its Universal Data Option object-relational add-on. It comes from the Illustra faction at Informix, the object database company it acquired back in 1996 for $387m with generally unhappy results. In those days the project was called Object Knowledge and consisted of a visualization browser (known variously as the Miro or OK browser) and a Toolkit, developed in the Tk and TCL scripting languages. That work in turn was based on the scientific data visualization Tioga project at the University of California at Berkeley, which is nowadays known as DataSplash (http://datasplash.cs.berkeley.edu/). Informix says the application provides a window – or in more fashionable terminology, a portal – into corporate data, and uses the notion of a canvas over which the screen viewer hovers like a camera. The viewer can pan across the canvas, and can also move in closer for information drill-down. For instance, customers can be represented as dots on a map, which when seen more closely turn onto pictures and eventually into data. The canvas can also have wormholes in it, so that other available information can be seen through it. All the visualization is tied directly to the database, so any changes are reflected immediately. Stonebraker says one of the development’s main aims was to produce a tool end users could work on to produce a working application in a day. More like Powerpoint and less like Powerbuilder he says. It includes high-level wizards to hide SQL and other coding. Visionary can work as both a standalone NT application and as an ActiveX control within another application, so that it can live within a Web browser, Powerpoint presentation or anything that supports ActiveX. Other applications can also be implemented as a wormhole in a nested canvas, and the object-relational engine can be used to gain access into Oracle or other-brand databases. Visionary will be sold initially as part of a two-week starter package, including consultancy, which includes getting the first application up and running. Prices weren’t immediately available, but Stonebraker said there would be no distinction between development and runtime pricing. He claims the nearest comparable commercial products are scientific data visualization tools such as AVS and Data Explorer, and the ARCView geographic visualization tool from Redland, California-based Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc. Informix has had a number of tries at visualization software in the past, including the graphical Wingz spreadsheet and the ill-fated New Era development environment.
