Uncover hidden truths with Interactive Filtering

Avinash Prasad
December 9, 2021

Atlas Charts has been updated with greater dashboard interactivity! With Interactive Filtering, users can click on charts to highlight and filter their dashboard data to their heart’s content.

Interactive dashboards support better decision making

Data visualisations are meant to be more than just a pretty collection of charts. They are a valuable decision making tool. At MongoDB, we believe that users should not only be able to manipulate their data but explore the significance of data changes in their dashboards to aid in making faster decisions. Last year, we added the ability to interact with charts and dashboards using Dashboard Filtering.

This year, we are taking it to the next level. We are very excited to release ‘Interactive Filtering’, allowing users to interact with a particular chart to filter data in other charts.

How does Interactive Filtering work?

So let’s use an example to understand how this feature works:

We have built a dashboard with multiple charts using the ‘Movies’ sample data source and added dashboard filters for the ‘languages’ and ‘rated’ fields. Previously, you could only interact with these filters by checking or unchecking options in the filter pane. While that option remains available, Interactive Filtering allows you to explore your data directly from the charts. So when you click on chart elements, such as bars, category labels or legend entries, it is a faster way to filter your dashboard. Chart elements are clickable if they are built with fields that are linked to dashboard filters. When filter fields are used on a chart’s category channels, we now highlight the requested data point but continue to show the other chart data, making it easy to see how the values compare.

Looking at the dashboard below, if you want to know how many Spanish movies are released or the average metacritic score of Spanish movies, then you can highlight ‘Spanish’ by clicking the ‘Spanish’ bar or the ‘Spanish’ label in the ‘Movies by Language’ chart. The other charts in the dashboard get filtered to show only data based on the Spanish language. You can also use the ‘languages’ dashboard filter to achieve the same result.

Interact by clicking directly in your dashboard

Interact by modifying your dashboard filters

How do you know what Charts are highlighted vs filtered? We now show a handy filter and highlight icon to indicate whether a chart is being filtered, highlighted, or both.

What if you want to go back to the previous state before you started clicking? Simple, just click anywhere on the empty area of a chart and the changes are rolled back. If you were to use the dashboard filter pane to highlight or filter the dashboards, we save the state. Think of the dashboard filter pane changes as a persistent state and click changes on a chart as a temporary state.

Depending on the dashboard filters selected, you also have the option to make a chart in the dashboard filter or highlight, filter only or ignore the dashboard filters completely.

Try Interactive Filtering today

With ‘Interactive Filtering’ the possibilities to manipulate and explore your data are limitless. Try the new highlighting functionality today by creating dashboard filters for your key fields and uncover the hidden answers in your data.

New to Charts? You can start now for free by signing up for MongoDB Atlas, deploying a free tier cluster and activating Charts. Have an idea on how we can make MongoDB Charts better? Feel free to leave an idea at the MongoDB Feedback Engine.

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Export Queries to Your Favorite Programming Languages with MongoDB for VS Code

In MongoDB for VS Code 0.7.0 we introduced the ability to export queries and aggregations that you’ve drafted in a playground to your favorite programming language. Going from prototype to code is now easier than ever. At MongoDB, we spend a lot of time thinking about how we can make developer workflows as easy as possible. This is why last year we released MongoDB for VS Code , an extension that lets you easily work with MongoDB from your VS Code environment. Since that first release, we have been looking at how developers use the extension and we have been talking to a lot of our users to understand what else we could add to make them even more productive. Everybody we talked to, really enjoyed the ability to navigate and explore their data and keep an eye on their MongoDB collections right next to their application code. We also learned that a lot of our users take advantage of Playgrounds to prototype their queries and make sure they return the results they expect with the performance they expect. Other developers go even further. They use Playgrounds as a way to keep track of all the queries and aggregations their application code runs in one central place and they store playground files in git repositories together with their code. This is a great way to document what the code is supposed to do when it talks to MongoDB so that other engineers on the team can always have an up-to-date birds-eye view of how the application interacts with the database. With this use case in mind, we found an opportunity to streamline the workflow even further. We asked ourselves: what if, Playground files could be used as the source of truth for all queries and aggregations and the actual application code could just be automatically generated from there? With the most recent release of MongoDB for VS Code, we took the first step in this direction. You can now select queries and aggregations within your Playground files and translate them into your favorite programming language. We currently have support for Node.js, Python, Java, and C#. With this new addition to our VS Code extension, we are hoping to make the process of designing and testing your queries and getting them into your application easier and more effective. If you try out this new functionality and you want to share your feedback, feel free to submit ideas or feature requests on our feedback portal or to reach out directly to me on Twitter .

December 7, 2021

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Data and the European Landscape: 3 Trends for 2022

The past two years have brought massive changes for IT leaders: large and complex cloud migrations; unprecedented numbers of people suddenly working, shopping and learning from home; and a burst in demand for digital-first experiences. Like everyone else, we are hoping that 2022 isn’t so disruptive (fingers crossed!), our customer conversations in Europe do lead us to believe the new year will bring new business priorities. We’re already noticing changes in conversations around vendor lock-in, thanks to the Digital Markets Act, a new enthusiasm for combining operational and analytical data to drive new insights faster, and a more strategic embrace of sustainability. Here’s how we see these trends playing out in 2022. Digital markets act draws new attention to cloud vendor lock-in in Europe We’ve heard plenty about the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act , which, in the name of ensuring fair and open digital markets, would place new restrictions on companies that are deemed to be digital “gatekeepers” in the region. That discussion will be nothing compared to the vigorous debate we expect once the EU begins the very tricky political business of determining exactly which companies will fall under the act. If the EU sets the bar for revenues, users, and market size high enough, it’s possible that the regulation will end up affecting only Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft. But a European group representing 2,500 CIOs and almost 700 organizations is now pushing to have the regulation encompass more software companies. Their main concern centers around “distorted competition” in cloud infrastructure services and a worry that companies are being locked into one cloud vendor. A trend that will likely increase in 2022 that pushes back on cloud vendor lock-in is embracing multi-cloud strategies. We should expect to see more organisations in the region pursuing multi-cloud environments as a means to improve business continuity and agility whilst being able to access best of breed services from each cloud provider. As we have always said …”it’s fine to date your cloud provider….but don’t ever marry them.” The convergence of operational and analytical data The processing of operational and analytical data is almost always contained in different data systems, each tuned to that use case and managed by separate teams. But because that data lives in separate places, it’s almost impossible for organisations to generate insights and automate actions in real time, against live data. We believe 2022 is the year we’ll see a critical mass of companies in the region make significant progress toward a convergence of their operational and analytical data. We’re already starting to see some of the principles of microservices in operational applications, such as domain ownership, be applied to analytics as well. We’re hearing about this from so many of our customers locally, who are looking at MongoDB as an application data platform that allows them to perform queries across both real-time and historical data, using a unified platform and a single query API. This results in the applications they are building becoming more intelligent and contextual to their users, while avoiding dependencies on centralized analytics teams that otherwise slow down how quickly new, data-driven experiences can be released. Sustainability drives local strategic IT choice Technology always has some environmental cost. Sometimes that’s obvious — such as the energy needs and emissions associated with Bitcoin mining. More often, though, the environmental costs are well hidden. The European Green Deal commits the European Union to reducing emissions by 55% by 2030, with a focus on sustainable industry. With the U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP26) recently completed in Glasgow, and coming off the hottest European summer on record, climate issues have become top of mind. That means our customers are increasingly looking to make their technical operations more sustainable — including in their choice of cloud provider and data centers. According to research from IDC , more than 20% of CxOs say that sustainability is now important in selecting a strategic cloud service provider, and some 29% of CxOs are including sustainability into their RFPs for cloud services. Most interesting, 26% say they are willing to switch to providers with better sustainability credentials. Historically, it’s been difficult to make a switch like that. That’s part of the reason we built MongoDB Atlas — to give our customers the flexibility to run in any region , with any of the three largest cloud providers, and to make it easy to switch between them, and even to run a single database cluster across them. Publicly available information about the footprint of individual regions and even single data centers will make it simpler for companies to make informed decisions. Already, at least one cloud platform has added indicators to regions with the lowest carbon footprint. Source: IDC, European Customers Engage Services Providers at All Stages of Their Cloud Journey, IDC Survey Spotlight, Doc #EUR248484021, Dec 2021

December 21, 2021