The unique and exciting 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 that humans visually perceive the world and how that could be applied to data visualization. We naturally perceive 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 VizQL behind the scenes. This allows you to focus on visualizing data, not writing code!

One of the benefits of VizQL is that it provides a common way of describing how the arrangement of various fields in a view defines a query related to the data. This common baseline can then be translated into numerous flavors of SQL, MDX, and TQL (short for Tableau Query Language, used for extracted data). Tableau will automatically perform the translation of VizQL into a native query to be run by the source data engine.

In its simplest form, the Tableau paradigm of working with data looks like the following diagram: