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VegaFusion Server-Side Acceleration

3 posts · Dec 2022 – Jul 2024

What this trail covers

Hex has evolved its visualization capabilities by donating VegaFusion to the Vega community. VegaFusion enables server-side acceleration for Vega charts, allowing them to handle large datasets by pushing aggregation to the backend. This integration was a key component in Hex's ability to render interactive visualizations over millions of rows of data. The project continues to be supported and maintained, with contributions including support for additional Vega transforms, faceted charts, and integration with Vega-Altair.

All Hex trails
  1. Donating VegaFusion to the Vega communityHex is donating the VegaFusion project to the Vega community, maintaining its BSD-3 license. They will continue to support development and maintenance. Contributions include support for additional Vega transforms (stack, pivot, impute), faceted charts, and integration with Vega-Altair as the recommended approach for scaling charts to large datasets.
  2. Introducing VegaFusion 1.0: now a Hex OSS projectHex has officially open-sourced VegaFusion, making it a Hex OSS project. The project has been re-licensed to BSD-3 from AGPL to encourage broader community adoption. Version 1.0 of VegaFusion is released, incorporating work done to back Hex's new interactive chart editor, including improved support for Altair. This allows Altair users to leverage VegaFusion for pre-evaluation and optimization of charts without Jupyter Widget extensions. Future work includes aggregate pushdown to SQL.
  3. An all-new, interactive visualization experience for HexThis post introduces an all-new, interactive visualization experience for Hex, featuring point-and-click visual filtering, a completely rebuilt chart cell UI with more intuitive controls and sensible defaults, and custom color palettes for on-brand charts. It highlights that the new experience is powered by the Vega ecosystem, specifically Vega-Lite for building blocks and VegaFusion for server-side acceleration to handle large datasets. The interactive visual filtering allows users to select data points directly from charts to create filtered result sets, which can then be used downstream in tables or other visualizations. The new editor UI simplifies chart creation with fewer clicks and finer-grained styling options. Custom color palettes can be configured by admins to ensure charts are on-brand by default.