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Graphviz: Open-source graph visualization software
121–130 of 156 posts
Re: Graphviz: Open-source graph visualization software
#122Another graphing tool is Pikchr (https://pikchr.org) from the creator of SQLite; actually the SQLite doc SQL-statements diagrams were (re)done using the Pikchr. It's some kind of extension of PIC language.
I'm not very proficient with graphing, so can't compare it to Graphviz, but a few examples I tried were relatively easy.
Re: Graphviz: Open-source graph visualization software
#123The `gvpr` tool in graphviz deserves more recognition. Graphviz, at its core, is a simple graph description language (DOT), which allows progressive enhancement , and a bunch of auto-layout tools where some double as renderers. The double-duty of the layout/renderers masks GraphViz's true power, which is that you can create a pipeline modifying your graph source (confusingly referred to as '.dot' files), progressivel…
When we started Graphviz, we vaguely sensed the potential for graph databases or environments, like neo4j, but we didn't work much in that area. It would take more resources, or intensity, than what we had. Anyway, gvpr is a modest attempt at a sort of graph query language.
Neo4J is interesting. It does something important, mainly, rationalize the mess of graph representations and algorithms. It's not hard to understand why that is valuable, but Neo4J sell it as being "efficient for linked structures" (relational databases don't have foreign keys and indices) and "intuitive" (have you ever tried to read the code for graph matching in Cymbal? I rest my case.) They have investments of hundreds of millions? Worth billions? They contributed something valuable to the tech economy.
It's surprising the conventional relational database products don't pay much attention to this opportunity, but they have gone vertical, e.g. credit card processing, because in the end it's more profitable to solve big end customer problems.
Re: Graphviz: Open-source graph visualization software
#124I've used GraphViz a number of times and highly recommend it as a standard tool on your belt. Having a stand-alone executable that can export to SVG is great. The most complex thing I've done with it [1]: a tool (MIT-license) that builds diagrams of the data and addressing pipeline for a DSP processor, and lets one 'scrub through' the assembler code frame by frame and see the values propagate through the blocks. Also…
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Re: Graphviz: Open-source graph visualization software
#125I use graphviz to get a quick postgresql schema overview (good for small to medium databases) https://github.com/enter-haken/schema
Autogenerated database documentation is often pretty hit and miss but tbls[1] does a pretty good job in that space. Especially when you comment on your tables, fields, views, functions etc (which is a good habit anyway!) the output is quite useful
Re: Graphviz: Open-source graph visualization software
#126For the ASCII lovers, I made this simple web page to help convert dot to text diagrams: https://dot-to-ascii.ggerganov.com It's useful to embed diagrams directly in source code for example. Here is a sample [0]: 0.6 ┌─────────────────────────┐ ▼ │ ┌───┐ 0.8 ┌───┐ 0.1 ┌───┐ 0.7 ┌───┐ 0.2 ┌───┐ │ d │ ─────▶ │ │ ◀───── │ e │ ─────▶ │ a │ ─────▶ │ b │ └───┘ │ c │ └───┘ └───┘ └───┘ │ │ 0.4 │ │ │ ◀─────────────────────────…
Awesome! Since switching from Mac to Linux I've been really missing Monodraw[1] for generating diagrams suitable for code comments. Emacs artist-mode is nice but I struggled to get the hang of it, will definitely be trying this!
Re: Graphviz: Open-source graph visualization software
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really simply, I typically use Neo4j, but if I have flat homegenous data, I just use Graphviz because the dot markup format lends itself to parsing easily in awk command lines. The times I have used networkx was when I needed a graph abstraction layer to reason about another graph query, so networkx wasn't used as a persistent graph store, but more of an intermediate data structure for orchestrating multiple service…
Have you tried gephi? It's not exactly an alternative to graphviz (eg. you can't cluster nodes) but it handles much larger graphs and has a bit more flexibility in layout. It has plugins for both dot and neo4j input. Graphs and infosec go very well together.
Wow that looks cool. It reminds me of what Orange.app was for regular data viz, this Gephi is for graphs.
It's pretty notable that the coolest data viz is for discovery, whereas most managers just need to know whether the line has gone up or down. I'm thinking there may be a fundamentally different cognitive orientation to whether one is hunting for opportunity or managing a resource.
Re: Graphviz: Open-source graph visualization software
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really simply, I typically use Neo4j, but if I have flat homegenous data, I just use Graphviz because the dot markup format lends itself to parsing easily in awk command lines. The times I have used networkx was when I needed a graph abstraction layer to reason about another graph query, so networkx wasn't used as a persistent graph store, but more of an intermediate data structure for orchestrating multiple service…
Have you tried gephi? It's not exactly an alternative to graphviz (eg. you can't cluster nodes) but it handles much larger graphs and has a bit more flexibility in layout. It has plugins for both dot and neo4j input. Graphs and infosec go very well together.
Gephi is fantastic, unfortunately it it hasn't seen a new release since 0.9.2 in 2017.
Re: Graphviz: Open-source graph visualization software
#129I use graphviz probably weekly and it's actually become a bit of a productivity hack. If there's something I don't want to do, I can often convince myself to just DRAW it instead, usually with graphviz. Once drawn, the actual task is easier, both because the barrier of starting is overcome, and because the drawing is useful in the task.
For example, I had to parse DWARF debug info recently to scrape type information, something I dreaded doing. Instead of diving into the DWARF specs, I set out to adapt one of the pyelftools [1] examples to produce a .dot file and graphed it with dot, producing [2].
Now looking at the picture, it's nearly obvious how functions and structs and types are stored. The rest is trivia (How do I access this attribute? How do I iterate over a DIE's children?).
Here's a simple alias so that anything that writes to /tmp/tmp.dot can be viewed with a single command:
alias graph='dot -Tpng /tmp/tmp.dot -o /tmp/tmp.png && open /tmp/tmp.png'
