Big data are large sets of data that due to its size or type cannot be captured, managed or processed by traditional databases. Big data usually have at least one of these characteristics: high variety, high velocity, or high volume.

You can collect big data from the most varied places: from the web, social media, log files, video or audio, sensors, transactional applications, and devices. The most part of big data is generated on a very large scale and in real time.

So, in order to collect, organize and analyze the big data, you need to use big data analytics.

Big data analytics main goal is to help companies discover any patterns they might be missing that can help their businesses. Either by answering specific questions, as it can also help to improve operations, increase efficiency, improve risk management, boost sales, and even improve your customer service.

For many companies, big data analysis is a complete challenge. Dealing with a great amount of data, data in different formats, data that can be gathered inside the company but also outside, it’s not easy. This is why companies use specific applications and software tools for data mining, forecasting, predictive analysis, data optimization, and text mining.
Companies now use a lot more data than they used just 5 or 10 years ago. And when you want to do big data analysis, you need the data to be beautiful, but mostly, you want the data to be useful, and to show multiple dimensions.

And this is where visualization comes in. With big data visualization, you not only look at the data, but you can also interact with it. The big data visualization needs to be easy to use, meaningful, understandable, approachable, and well-designed.

With more and more data needed to be analyzed, technology evolves, just like big data visualization tools evolve. They need to be faster, more intuitive, more interactive.

Here are some of the visualization tools for big data you can use:

Ember Charts is a customizable and extensible charting library that includes horizontal bar, scatter, pie and time series chart. You’ll be able to add legends, tooltips, mouseover effects and labels, that will help the interaction with the data.

Google Charts are completely free, easy to use and is one of the most used visualization tools for big data. You can choose from a wide variety of charts (column, histogram, stepped area, line, donut, among many others) and completely customize them making them your own. Google Charts work very well with real time data.

FusionCharts include more than 900 maps and 90 charts. One of their great features is that you don’t need to start from scratch. They already include hundreds of live examples you can use and make your job a lot easier.

FusionCharts is a great visualization tool for big data that allows you to edit your charts the way you want (like changing fonts, colors, etc.), but it also gives you great control over how charts behave under different scenarios.

HighCharts have two specialized tools for data visualization. The HighCharts allows you to create the most diverse charts for your projects, and the HighStock lets you create timelines, which can be very useful for some kind of data. But they also have a data visualization tool specially designed for maps. You can build interactive maps to display election results, sales, or anything that you want.

SAS Visual Analytics gives you an insightful way to look at your data. They use advanced data visualization techniques and you have scenario analysis, forecasting, decision trees, goal seeking, and other techniques as well. The charts, reports and dashboards are interactive and you can easily add some maps as well.

With CrossFilter , you can explore big data with more than a million records. They use objects, values and other commands and components for the visualization.

On Envision.js you can easily create amazing and interactive visualizations with real-time data, AJAX-driven financial charts, finance visualizations, time series, and others. They have some templates for the different charts and graphs that will help you.

There is a wide variety of visualization tools for big data you can use. While some are free and others are paid, you need to choose the right one for the kind of data you have.