Better support for cloud deployment may be the first order of business for MongoDB these days, but the originator of that popular NoSQL database has an eye on better dashboard visualization support as well.

At MongoDB World 2017 in Chicago, MongoDB Inc.'s Atlas cloud data services were foremost, as the company moved to provide Google and Microsoft cloud support. But there was more, as the company also showed a glimpse of MongoDB Charts, upcoming software intended to provide self-service charting of JSON-oriented MongoDB data for business users.

Such software helps turn mountains of NoSQL data into intuitive charts and dashboard visualizations. That has been the strong suit of fast-rising Tableau, Qlik and other BI software providers, but it also is an area of interest to MongoDB Inc. as it builds a data ecosystem around its mainstay database.

For its part, MongoDB Charts is meant to provide another option for data leaders that need to deliver analytical views on data to business users. The software, as demonstrated at the company's yearly user event, offers a user interface meant to work natively with the MongoDB document model.

Charts in the pipeline According to Eliot Horowitz, CTO and co-founder of MongoDB, Charts supports the MongoDB aggregation pipeline, which works to transform documents into aggregated results. Tom Schenk Tom Schenk He said MongoDB has found strong use in operational applications, and the addition of Charts would help to make dashboard visualization an integrated part of operational processes, rather than just as a part of separate processes running against batch data. MongoDB Charts will be part of a larger rollout of enhancements planned for later this year, he said. Charts would join MongoDB's existing BI connector, which links relational BI tools such as Tableau to MongoDB. For Ovum analyst Tony Baer, MongoDB Charts is emblematic of an emerging trend in dashboard visualization. "Most data platforms are now adding basic charting capabilities to dispense with the need for third-party tools like Tableau or Qlik," he said. "MongoDB is now joining the party." The unique feature in the case of MongoDB Charts is that it will visualize the data without having to resort to flattening JSON data to make it look relational, he said. Instead, Baer continued, MongoDB Charts can query individual fields without having to merge them all into a single row, or explode the document and represent nested fields in separate relational tables.