History of Tableau

The company was founded in Mountain View, California in January, 2003 by
Chris Stolte, Christian Chabot and Pat Hanrahan.Their initial aim was to
commercialize research conducted at Stanford University’s Department of Computer
Science between 1999 and 2002. Professor Pat Hanrahan and Ph.D. student
Chris Stolte who specialized in visualization techniques for exploring and analyzing
relational databases and data cubes led research in the use of table-based displays
to browse multidimensional relational databases.Together, they combined a
structured query language for databases with a descriptive language for rendering
graphics and invented a database visualization language called
VizQL (Visual Query Language).VizQL formed the core of the Polaris system,
an interface for exploring large multi-dimensional databases.In 2003, Tableau
was spun out of Stanford with an eponymous software application.
The product queries relational databases, cubes, cloud databases, and spreadsheets
and then generates a number of graph types that can be combined into dashboards
and shared over a computer network or the internet. The founders moved the
company to Seattle, Washington in October, 2003, where it remains headquartered
today.