Dashboards with tons of charts are all about pre-computing. In the RDBMS world you abandon normal relational tables and use a non-relational star schema. Star s

Dashboards with tons of charts are all about pre-computing. In the RDBMS world you abandon normal relational tables and use a non-relational star schema. Star schemas are basically just tables that store pre-computed data. Sometimes it's a completely separate database for just reporting, with new daily data being fed in all the time, and results pre-computed. These systems tend to be queries against the past. It's accepted that you may be 1 day behind. But that little concession to query past-only allows all sorts of great tricks to have instantaneous reporting against huge data sets. Making it seem like your reports have been blessed by the tears of the performance gods. Even google search is "cheating" by searching against the past, not the present. Could you imagine how slow it would be if your google search query triggered a web crawler in real time to scour the internet? Yeah, you might be waiting several days for your crawl to complete.