Existing data visualization formalisms are restricted to single-table inputs, which makes existing visualization grammars like Vega-lite or ggplot2 tedious to use, have overly complex APIs, and unsound when visualization multi-table data. This paper presents the first visualization formalism to support databases as input -- in other words, *database visualization*. A visualization specification is defined as a mapping from database constraints (e.g., schemas, types, foreign keys) to visual representations of those constraints, and we state that a visualization is *faithful* if it visually preserves the underlying database constraints. This formalism explains how visualization designs are the result of implicit data modeling decisions. We further develop a javascript library called dvl and use a series of case studies to show its expressiveness over specialized visualization systems and existing grammar-based languages.
@article{arxiv.2504.08979,
title = {A Formalism and Library for Database Visualization},
author = {Eugene Wu and Xiang Yu Tuang and Antonio Li and Vareesh Bainwala},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.08979},
year = {2025}
}