Business intelligence.

• Position: TechnologyTOOLS - Tableau Software introduces VizQLTM

Tableau Software, a developer of visual analysis and reporting systems for business intelligence, has brought out its first products, which the Seattle-based company says enable people of any technical ability to see and understand the information in databases by using a unique drag-and-drop interface. Tableau promotes what it terms "visual thinking" by producing interactive pictures of data rather than static rows and columns.

Tableau Software is the culmination of five years of research and development that originated in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University. The project was initiated through a grant sponsored by the U.S. Department of Defense. The Tableau development team has produced what it calls "a fundamentally new way of interacting with the desktop files, relational databases and OLAP [online application processing] servers" that are the backbone of the $20 billion database and business intelligence industries.

At the heart of Tableau's software is a new proprietary query language called VizQLTM. This new language marries a query to a visual response. By analyzing data visually, users can spot...