Interactive visual analytics on Big Data: Tableau vs D3.js

Big Data from innumerable sources offers immense prospects for intelligent decision making in every single field, in spite of its challenging factors like huge volume, extreme variety or varying velocity. Big Data analytics can provide new perceptions from data, which would have otherwise unnoticed, while proper visualization of the data itself may result in solutions to Big Data problems through visual means by presenting the vital elements in the vast data in a human-interaction friendly format. But most of the traditional graphics and charting tools fail to draw the big picture from the big data that spans millions of records. This paper exhibits the effectiveness of visualization in exposing and communicating the essential facts in a large dataset using the two currently popular but divergent visualization tools, D3.js and Tableau, and performs a comparative analysis of the two.