Tableau connects directly to native data engines and also includes the option to extract data locally. The unique experience of working with data in Tableau is a result of VizQL: visual query language.

VizQL was developed as a Stanford research project, focusing on the natural ways humans visually perceive the world and how that could be applied to data visualization. We naturally see differences in size, shape, spatial location, and color. VizQL allows Tableau to translate your actions, as you drag and drop fields of data in a visual environment, into a query language that defines how the data encodes those visual elements. You will never need to read, write, or debug VizQL. As you drag and drop fields onto various shelves defining size, color, shape, and spatial location, Tableau will generate the visual query language behind the scenes. This allows you to focus on visualizing data.

One of the benefits of VizQL is that it provides a common way of describing how the arrangement...