Managing and presenting large amounts of up-to-date data...?

Hi All,

I'm in the midst of a Rails application that produces line,bar, and pie charts for constantly accumulated data. That said, I'm looking for some quality ways in which to deal with presenting the large amounts of data while keeping the graphs accurate and up to date. Obviously the simple answer is to build and run a new query each and every time a chart is accessed. However, my gut tells me that there are frameworks/libraries, etc. that can manage this -- perhaps in the background. Any thoughts?

For the record, I am using XMLSWF charts (http://www.maani.us/ xml_charts/).

Best.

For what it's worth, I am presenting tabular data in an ajaxian manner using settimer and json, gethering the data and putting it out with innerhtml. I think you could do the same with graphical data. I'll gladly send you the javascript I have for doint this if you want. - Janna B