Tableau Software: VizQL and Data Engine

In 2003 Tableau spun out of Stanford University with VizQL™, a technology that completely changes working with data by allowing simple drag and drop functions to create sophisticated visualizations. The fundamental innovation is a patented query language that translates your actions into a database query and then expresses the response graphically.

Tableau is now part of Salesforce.

The next breakthrough was the ability to do ad-hoc analysis of millions of rows of data in seconds with Tableau’s Data Engine. The Data Engine is a high-performing analytics database on your PC. It has the speed benefits of traditional in-memory solutions without the limitations that your data must fit in memory. And in Tableau’s tradition of making powerful tools accessible to all, there’s no custom scripting needed to use the Data Engine.

At the heart of Tableau is a proprietary technology that makes interactive data visualization an integral part of understanding data. A traditional analysis tool forces you to analyze data in rows and columns, choose a subset of your data to present, organize that data into a table, then create a chart from that table. VizQL skips those steps and creates a visual representation of your data right away, giving you visual feedback as you analyze. As a result you get a much deeper understanding of your data and can work much faster than conventional methods–up to 100 times faster.

The Data Engine is a break-through analytics database designed to overcome the limitations of existing databases and data silos and to truly support the process of visual analysis. It is designed to reflect the capabilities of the latest hardware and the complete memory hierarchy from disk to L1 cache. It was developed in collaboration between Tableau Software and Stanford University.