1. “Why is there all this computer graphics technology but the only real applications are video games and movies? We wanted to be the ones to create the breakthrough business application that helped everyday people see and understand their data like never before.”
2. -- Christian Chabot, CEO and co-founder

There are lots of reasons why Tableau is the breakthrough leader in visual analysis.

It didn’t hurt that we have renowned thought leaders from three different industries: Databases, Graphics, and Business Intelligence on our team. Or that we have PhDs from top universities on board, including co-founder and Vice President of Engineering Dr. Chris Stolte. Stolte’s break-through and much-honored thesis is the basis of Tableau’s unique technology. Member of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences, Pat Hanrahan is Tableau’s CTO and co-founder. He boasts a pair of Academy Awards -- from his days as chief architect of Pixar’s RenderMan software, used in Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and other Hollywood blockbusters, as well as from more recent work on sub-surface scattering. Director Dr. Jock Mackinlay is credited with inventing the field of “information visualization” while at Xerox PARC. We could tell you about Dr. Matthew Eldridge too, but we would prefer to keep him a secret. These are just four in a collective of exceptional individuals that make up Tableau.

But what is it that makes Tableau different? At the heart of Tableau is a proprietary technology that makes interactive data visualization an integral part of understanding data. Typically, most people analyze data in rows and columns, hoping to find an insight and then produce a graph or chart to communicate the finding. What Pat and Chris did was make it possible to employ data visualization as an integral part of the analytical process itself – not just as the end result. Chris’ scholarly work describes his invention: a database visualization language called VizQL™ (Visual Query Language). You can find some of it online by looking at the history of the Polaris Project at Stanford.

This fundamentally new architecture does for data interactions in visual form what SQL did for data interactions in text form. VizQL statements describe an infinite class of sophisticated multi-dimensional visualizations. With VizQL, people have a single analysis interface and database visualization tool to produce a broad range of graphical summaries. Users can transform any database or spreadsheet into information visualizations tailored to the data, including dashboards, worksheets and workbooks.

Drag-and-Drop operations in Tableau Desktop create a query in VizQL. VizQL interprets the query, packages a SQL or MDX query to the database and then expresses the response graphically.

Because of VizQL, fast analytics and visualization are reality. People with little or no training can see and understand data faster than ever and in ways like never before. And that’s the biggest difference of all.

For more details about the technological underpinnings of the Tableau Difference, read our whitepaper.