Concept: Interactive Viz Queries
When you build a visualization in a discovery board, you're actually creating queries against a
data source. The act of dragging a field to a drop zone creates a query that is sent to
the data source, fetches the requested data, and then visually renders the results as a
chart or table.
By default, the viz automatically updates the data when you make a change. However, you can
temporarily turn off live, automatic updates of the data for all vizzes in the board. You
might want to disable automatic updates to improve performance if the board contains many
vizzes with a lot of data. To turn off the live updates, select
Automatically
Update
from the discovery board menu. When you change a viz, such as changing a
field in a drop zone, Workday displays an empty viz until you click Update
now
in a viz.When some people think of queries, they think of SQL (the structured query language used to
access data stored in a relational database). Viz queries aren't written in SQL, they're
constructed by your actions in the discovery board. However, it might help to understand
how data is requested and returned if we make a comparison with SQL.
If a viz query were expressed in SQL, it would look something like this statement (the clauses
are listed in the order that they're processed):
SELECT <attributes in builder>, <summarizations in builder> FROM <data source> WHERE <attributes in filters> GROUP BY <attributes in builder> ORDER BY <attribute sort options> LIMIT <attribute limit options>
Note that the query is constructed based on the field role (summarization or attribute), and
where the fields are placed in the drop zones.