Last friday our customers noticed a visual update that rolled out for the Chartio app. This wasn't a major release and we didn't add any features, but it has been a chance for us to unify the look of our service with the identity we're presenting to the public, and create a simple foundation for all of the good things to come. Here's a quick walkthrough of the changes for our customers:

We want Chartio to be the best interface to data, and that means always, always, always focusing on that data's presentation. So we changed the navigation mechanism to allow for more screen real-estate for dashboards, flattened the overall interface design, and changed how we use color - "meaningfully and with restraint".

There is so much more to come, but I'll save talking about that for when those features ship. For now we're happy to have a strong foundation, something that we hope highlights the useful and the changing, removes unnecessary distraction, and makes it easier to focus on what's important: your business, your development, whatever it is that you use Chartio for.

We'll continue to evolve the usability, features, and presentation of Chartio, but if you'd ever like to let us know what you think we'd love to hear it. Just say hello@chartio.com

In mid-April, Mozilla announced project Stone Ridge, a performance testing framework for necko (the networking layer in gecko, Mozilla's open source browser engine). We were contacted by Mozilla for help in visualizing Stone Ridge, i.e. the performance of various networks, in a public dashboard format.

Stone Ridge was built to help Mozilla test the effects of networking code improvements across different types of network providers, from commercial broadband to mobile phones in the developing world. By testing often and visualizing trends, these simulated network stats help them test speed improvements and check against performance regression across connections.You can see Mozilla's Chartio dashboard here which shows the performance of various networks.

In true open source spirit, Mozilla wanted to make their dashboard public to be able to share the network performance data live with the Mozilla community. This is the first time we've have had the request to make a dashboard public, and we worked closely with the Mozilla team to make that possible. We're looking forward to working with more open source projects to help visualize community data.

This is a great example of a customer visualizing other types of data in Chartio. Many of our customers take business data, make important business decisions off the data, and then share with various teams. We made Chartio flexible enough to interact with various data sources so users can explore any type of data. We love the fact that Mozilla is using Chartio to visualize network performance data and sharing it with the community, so they can see how the network is performing and increase the speed in how Mozilla reacts.

If you are interested in having a public dashboard like Mozilla email us at hello(at)chartio(dot)com. Or if you want to get charting today, sign up for your 30 day free trial and start using Chartio!

At the beginning of this month, Chartio participated in a Rackspace webinar titled "Supercharge Your MySQL Application Performance with Cloud Databases."

In addition to participating in the webinar, we recently wrote a contributed blog post for the Rackspace blog outlining how Rackspace Cloud Databases can easily connect to Chartio. We love Rackspace Cloud databases because Rackspace makes it easy to connect to data.

We took time to interview J.R. Arredondo on the Rackspace Cloud Databases team to learn more about the product. Below is what he had to say:

How does Rackspace Cloud Databases differentiate from other databases out there?

There are two main distinctions that our customers love about Cloud Databases. The first one is that the product is designed with performance in mind. The architecture is purpose-built to avoid the problems of traditional virtualization. As you know, traditional approaches use a hypervisor, which has very negative effects on the performance of a database. Databases require access to the storage, the memory, the network, the CPU, etc., and a traditional hypervisor only gets in the way of a database trying to execute queries or aggregations. It's really an intermediary that only slows things for the database engine. Our architecture is based on container-based virtualization. You can think of a container as an isolated tenant that is given some priority across CPU, IO, storage, etc. on a shared OS. The result is that when a container is executing, there is no traditional hypervisor between the database and the hardware slowing things down. Cloud Databases is not just MySQL installed on a Cloud Server. The hardware is specifically built for MySQL. The storage, the compute nodes, the network - they are all close together to help your app run fast.

I would say that the second thing customers tell us is how easy it is to be productive. As you can imagine, DBAs or developers have tons of work to do. When I was an engineer I always had new requirements to tackle and new features to build. The last thing a developer needs is to spend time installing or configuring a database, or manage it over time. With Rackspace's Control Panel you can literally get a database in under 3 minutes. You should try it! And with our API, you can even automate that in a script or in a line of code in your app to get yourself a new database or to manipulate it, add disk, resize it, etc.

What type of data is best stored in Rackspace Cloud Databases?

Cloud Databases implements a MySQL database. This data tends to be relational in nature. These are some of the most common applications out there. You have tables, columns, indexes, relationships, restrictions, SQL queries, etc. From a domain perspective, we see all kinds of applications: from web sites, to web apps, ecommerce sites, internal business apps, etc. Many of these apps are the foundation of a business process, so they generate data themselves in the form of calculations or aggregations, which is when customers need other partner solutions. For example, they may need to visualize data or analyze it in some tool, in which case they can always use Chartio. From a technical perspective, it's a real MySQL database. We have not modified it in some weird way. Developers and DBAs can quickly get started creating the data model and the SQL, just deploy their app, change their connection string, and done. This can be done easily with the same tools they already use, such as MySQL Workbench for example. There is no dev productivity loss.

What are you most excited about with Rackspace Cloud Databases?

I personally get really excited with I talk to customers from two specific camps. The first one is when there is a business user who would like to create a small application and knows a little bit of SQL, but they don't have the skills to create, configure and manage the database. They are really not DBAs, but they know a little bit of development. Then they use the Control Panel and get a server. Then they use whatever tool they know and they can be productive within minutes. That is a huge win. Someone once told me this stating that he felt "he had stayed at the Holiday Inn!"

The second camp of users that I am excited about are those who are using the cloud through automation. They are more advanced. They don't want to use the Control Panel because the databases they are creating are actually part of their application, dynamically, at runtime. Many use Puppet or Chef to automate the creation of infrastructures, and many others just embed in their application logic calls to our APIs to provision, manage, or deprovision databases automatically. They may use our SDKs but many use our APIs directly. Either way these cloud automation and programmability scenarios get them a huge advantage. They use infra as just software. It's kind of powerful to think that some app may have "Delete Picture" or "Insert Picture" methods in their app, but they may also have "Add Database" or "Delete Database." That is powerful.

Do you have any other webinars or events where people can sign up and learn more?

We actually just did a webinar a couple of weeks ago that people could visit to learn more. In this webinar we talk a little about Cloud Databases, what it is, but then quickly get into some uses and scenarios. We show them click by click how to provision a database, use it in MySQL Workbench, how to use Sysbench for performance, and how to do beautiful visualizations with Chartio! The recording of the webinar is here, or if you prefer just to look at the slides, you can go here.

If people are interested in signing up for Rackspace Cloud Databases, where do they go?

Creating a Rackspace account is really easy. Just go to rackspace.com and there is a signup button on the top right. You can be up and running in no time. All you have to think about is whether you want a Core Account or a Managed Account. If you are just trying the Rackspace Cloud or want to learn just get the Core Account. You only pay what you consume. But if you want Rackspace to manage your application, then get a Managed Account. In that, you pay a small extra fee but you can then have our Rackers take care of your infrastructure. For example, we can backup databases for you, or import data and help you create it. Regardless of what you need, the slides above can be very useful just to play around and get a feel of what Cloud Databases is about. And as always anybody can just reach me @jrarredondo and let me know if there is anything I can help you with.

If you are interested in using Chartio with your Rackspace Cloud Database, sign up for your 30 day free trial and get charting today!

This past week Robert Stein, Deputy Director of the Dallas Museum of Art, spoke at the Museum and Web conference in Portland, Oregon. Below is a guest post from Robert talking about the work he has done at the Dallas Museum of Art and how data and Chartio helps wrangle the data into actionable charts and graphs.

The Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) is the largest general art museum in North Texas and has been collecting art in Dallas for 110 years. We recently made a decision that we could best serve our local community by dropping our admission charge and making general admission to the DMA free to anyone who wants to visit. At the same time, we pioneered a program of free membership called DMA Friends, that seeks to promote the participation and engagement of audiences with art. DMA Friends sign up at the Museum via iPad kiosks located on the main concourse and choose from dozens of activities structured as "Badges" that earn them credit for their participation with the Museum. This credit can, in turn, be used to claim rewards at the DMA like free parking, catalogs from the shop, or even behind-the-scenes tours of our art storage facility.

In addition to providing great experiences for the public, the DMA wants to use the data collected from DMA Friends to better understand how visitors participate with the activities we offer and how we can change our approach to excel at engaging visitors better.

Chartio has been a great tool that helps us wrangle this data into actionable charts and graphs. We actively monitor how many people are signing up for DMA Friends during the course of a day. Chartio gives our non-technical staff the ability to explore what's happening in the data behind the scenes and ask questions about what certain patterns in the data might be. By watching the data accumulating in real-time, we can easily redeploy staff in a different way to achieve better results and service to people visiting the art museum.

I gave a talk about DMA Friends last week at the 2013 International Conference of Museums and the Web (#MW2013) held in Portland, Oregon. MW2013 featured museum professionals from around the world presenting their best work and highlighting how technology can be applied inside cultural organizations. The talk I gave was entitled "DMA Friends: Promoting Participation and Engagement with Art." You can review the slides from the talk on slideshare.

I highlight our data collection process starting on slide 30, where I begin with a screenshot of a Chartio dashboard seen below.

The development of DMA Friends is also documented in a formal paper written for the conference which can be accessed online for free here. Bruce Wyman of USD-Mach Consulting was my co-author and presenter at the conference and was vital in the design and implementation of the DMA Friends platform here in Dallas. We also partnered with LearningTimes LLC and customized a version of their BadgeOS open-source software to create DMA Friends.

If you are in Dallas please stop by the DMA to check out DMA Friends first hand. And if you are interested in a similar charting experience, sign up for your 30 day free trial on Chartio and get charting today!