I'm working on an update to SQLAutoDoc, which is my pet database version control and monitoring application. A few years back I attended one of Edward R. Tufte's presentations (which I thoroughly enjoyed and highly recommend). One of the concepts mentioned by Mr. Tufte was something he called "sparklines" -- little tiny charts that are displayed in-line with text.

I want SQLAutoDoc to tell me about SQL Wait States so that I can quickly spot network issues but want to show the status of all available wait states. There are lots of them and the current wait state value often doesn't make a lot of sense unless it's viewed in context (does it frequently have that value? If so and the problem just started then the wait state is probably irrelevant). I thought sparklines would be the perfect mechanism to concisely display wait state information.

Well, looking around to see what others have done with sparklines, I happened across the blog of Dr. Nicolas Bissantz and an article entitled Dashboards vs Sparklines. This is a great article, makes a lot of sense and will impact how large I make my charts from now on! (IE: Why fill a page with a single chart when you can fill it with dozens! :)