Tableau Software

Tableau Software began as an extensive R&D project inside Stanford University’s prestigious Department of Computer Science. Sponsored by the U.S. Departments of Defense and Energy, a team of Stanford Ph.D. researchers solved one of the most difficult problems in computer science: enabling people to see and understand the information in databases. Under the leadership of Dr. Pat Hanrahan and Dr. Chris Stolte, our company has produced a fundamentally new way of interacting with the same relational and OLAP databases that are the backbone of the global database and business intelligence markets.


Tableau Software is the leading provider of visual analysis and reporting solutions. Our products help people see and understand the information in databases by enabling them to build drag & drop analyses of their business data. The results are visual, insightful, and unlike anything you've seen. They help people save time and make better decisions. The success of products in the BI industry depends critically on people's ability to easily extract information from complex databases of varying formats. To that end, Tableau products set the new standard for visual analysis. They enable people of any technical skill to analyze databases of any query language by simply building drag & drop visualizations of what they want to see.

Although visual interfaces and databases are two of the success stories of the computer revolution, their synergy to date has been modest, probably because visual interfaces have focused on human capabilities while databases have focused on efficient query processing.

How did Tableau become the breakthrough leader in visual analysis for databases?  Our products are built on a database visualization language called VizQL™ (Visual Query Language). It represents a fundamentally new architecture for database interaction.

What is VizQL™? It's like SQL. The development of SQL led to a revolution in database technology. Suddenly, complex queries were easily described as readable text. Programmers were freed from writing custom procedural programs in order to query corporate databases and instead could compose simple statements.

VizQL™ marks a similar step forward. What SQL did for database interactions in text form, VizQL™ does for database interactions in visual form. Sophisticated visualizations are described by declarative VizQL™ statements. The standard approach when developing analysis systems is to provide a set of pre-canned objects — bar chart objects, scatter-plot objects, etc. This legacy approach is similar to selling a database with six “pre-approved” queries rather than with a complete query language like SQL. Tableau's VizQL™ approach provides a “Lego set” for database visualization. It marks a revolution for reporting and analysis for business users.

The Tableau Software team includes renowned thought leaders from three different industries: Databases, Graphics, and Business Intelligence. Our culture is based on breakthrough innovation and customer success.

Tableau's family of customers includes leading companies from every industry, from F500 multi-nationals and the U.S. government, to small consultancies. Our products are in use today by business intelligence professionals, marketers, market researchers, analysts, financial planners, strategic planners, sales departments, supply-chain specialists, national security specialists, engineers, scientists, social scientists and executives around the world.