Visualizing real-time Graphs with PuppyGraph

Bring powerful graph analysis and elegant visualization directly to your data lake

Why real-time graph visualization matter

Many teams today store their data in modern lakehouse formats like Delta Lake, Iceberg, or Parquet. PuppyGraph makes it easy to turn this existing data into a graph model and run graph queries directly on it—without having to move or duplicate the data. This real-time capability makes it possible to visualize up-to-date relationships using yFiles, unlocking faster insights and reducing infrastructure complexity.

Whether you're working with security logs, user behavior data, or service dependencies, the ability to visualize graphs without data movement improves accuracy and speeds up investigation.

What is PuppyGraph?

Supported data sources

By leveraging the Lakehouse architecture, PuppyGraph uses your existing data store permissions and columnar storage format, applying min/max statistics and predicate pushdown to make queries more efficient—especially for relationship graphs where multi-hop searches and complex joins are the norm.

PuppyGraph is also designed for scale. Its auto-partitioned, distributed architecture handles petabyte-scale datasets with ease, ensuring fast performance even as your graph grows. Whether you're tracking threats, investigating fraud, or mapping service dependencies, PuppyGraph simplifies your stack and accelerates insight.

Visualizing PuppyGraph data with yFiles

yFiles for HTML is a commercial programming library designed for diagram visualization and is perfectly suited for graph database challenges. Its advanced layout algorithms transform your data into intuitive, informative networks. You decide which elements from your database are shown, how they appear, and how users interact with them, enabling bespoke interfaces tailored to your needs.

Tailored visualization & mapping

Easily choose which information from your database to visualize and decide exactly how elements and relationships are represented—whether with arrows, nested hierarchies, or custom structures—to match your use case.

Custom styling & levels of detail

Create unique visual designs for your entities using icons, images, progress bars, or interactive elements. Fine-tune details and content for a visualization that’s always clear and relevant—no matter the data complexity.

Data-driven layouts

Highlight patterns and structures like hierarchies, clusters, or cycles by leveraging a variety of layouts (hierarchic, circular, radial, etc.). With yFiles’ automatic arrangement, your graphs remain neat and readable at all times.

/

This image shows a data-driven circular layout generated with yFiles. Patterns and relationships within the dataset are organized in a visually appealing circle, making it easy to spot clusters and direct connections. Automatic arrangement ensures the graph remains neat and readable, perfect for visualizing dense networks like movie actor collaborations.

This image demonstrates a hierarchic layout with yFiles, where data is structured in clearly defined top-down levels. Each node’s position reflects its relationship within the hierarchy, making structures and dependencies easy to understand at a glance. Such layouts are ideal for visualizing parent-child relationships, production flows, or organizational charts.

This image presents an orthogonal layout done with yFiles, where nodes are connected via right-angled edges, creating clean, rectangular structures. This style is particularly effective for highlighting parallel relationships, cycles, and data clusters, and for keeping networks with many connections uncluttered and easy to follow.

This image features a radial layout using yFiles, which arranges nodes outwards from a central element like spokes on a wheel. The structure makes it easy to emphasize central nodes, connected components, and hub relationships. Radial layouts are excellent for exploring dataset focus points and clearly visualizing influence or reach across a network.

Visual representations of different database types

Dynamic interaction & exploration

Go beyond static images—enable grouping, drill-down, and filtering to simplify and explore your data in depth. Support smooth navigation and editing with mouse, keyboard, or touch, and enhance the user experience through animated transitions and on-demand loading or aggregation of data.

Generating your own app with low-code tools

If you want to quickly scaffold your own application that connects to your database, consider using the App Generator for yFiles. It's a low-code tool that allows you to visually and interactively create graph visualization applications with a low-code approach. Generate a graph application in just ten minutes from scratch!

The generator is a web application that can be used without registration or sign-up at no fees.

Once you are done with the setup, you can have the app create a source code bundle of the application that you designed with your choice of programming language and UI framework. Combined the bundle with yFiles for HTML and create stand-alone applications or integrate the results into your existing apps and dashboards.

yWorks App Generator

This image shows the interface of the yWorks app generator for creating a Cloud Security Graph. The central canvas displays a flow-based diagram that defines a data pipeline using different modules such as Gremlin Loader, Projection, Filter, Node Creator, and Graph Builder. The left sidebar provides various options to extract, transform, and load data from multiple sources. On the right, the configuration panel for the Gremlin Loader is open, showing database connection details, authentication fields, and a sample Gremlin query. The interface is designed to allow users to build and visualize graph-based solutions with a no-code approach.

Step-by-step guide

How to deploy and query PuppyGraph data for graph visualizations with yFiles

This guide outlines the core technical steps to launch a PuppyGraph instance using Docker and query its data with code for a visualization application.

Conclusion

By combining PuppyGraph with yFiles, you can go straight from raw data to interactive insight. This integration gives teams the speed, scalability, and clarity they need to understand complex relationships at scale—without waiting on stale snapshots or juggling disconnected tools.

Whether you’re working in security, fraud detection, telecom, or supply chain, PuppyGraph + yFiles brings powerful graph analysis and elegant visualization directly to your data lake.

Ready to see it in action? Download PuppyGraph’s forever-free Developer Edition and sign up for the free trial with yWorks.