How to build an efficient user-facing dashboard?

dylan — Thu, 25 May 2017 01:15:45 +0000

So I'm working on an early stage startup with some friends of mine. I'm building a backend web app for our customers (other businesses, we're B2B). Perhaps without surprise, our landing page after login is a dashboard.

For this first iteration, I'm just going to start with basic data points: trends over time in a line chart, and a breakdown of specific events in a pie chart.

I know the old adage, or know that it's something along the lines of don't do extra work for scaleability before you even need to scale. But I do want this to be efficient, and we're already talking with a few potential clients who are quite large (have a large number of customers). If signed on, one of these clients would be creating ~500 rows a day in the table that my dashboard would be querying. If I'm displaying trends on a monthly basis, and including 6 months in the graph, that's 90,000 relevant rows that the dashboard would be asking Postgres to calculate averages on. And that's for just one line on the graph. Now I'm sure the database could handle that on principle in an acceptable amount of time. But I'm worried about the stress that may be caused as more large clients sign on.

Am I being paranoid here?
Has anyone built user-facing dashboards like this in the past? Any advice?

One thing I was thinking, is should I create a secondary table of daily averages for datapoints? We're going to introduce a feature to customers that would allow them to.. essentially they would be creating a new datapoint, resulting in a new line in that trends chart.

Anyways. I haven't thought this all the way through yet, which may show in some of my written thought process above. I was just wondering if anyone has gone down this road before, and has any advice. Might not be using the right search terms, but I'm having a hard time finding relevant articles online.

Just to say it upfront, while I have a decent grasp on most of what I'm doing thanks to working under an awesome lead at my internship -> employment for the last year, I am definitely still bit of a n00b in terms of.. idk, how to treat my database right / the above.

Hi, I'm dylan

dylan — Thu, 25 May 2017 00:55:52 +0000

I have been coding for 7 years.

You can find me on Twitter as @0x64796c616e (all the handles with my actual name were taken unless i put some arbitrary number at the end which bothered me so i just embraced the numbers hashed my name)

I live in Charleston, SC.

I work for Engage Talent

I mostly program in these languages: Javascript, Go.

I am currently learning more about efficiently handling large sets of structured data.

Nice to meet you.

Omg I forgot to add some of my own sentences to this template. Just wanted to say I've been following @thepracticaldev for a while now, have always enjoyed the articles linked to from that handle on this site. I'm happy to be a part of this community now!

DEV Community: dylan

How to build an efficient user-facing dashboard?

Hi, I'm dylan