Mental Model: The Tableau Query Process

Tableau under the hood. What really happens when you drag and drop pills onto the canvas in Tableau?

In this, the second installment of The Sensemakers‘ new “Mental Models” series, Keith and Jonathan pick apart the Tableau query process. This mental model offers a visual illustration of this process and provides a useful diagram of it, from canvas → VizQL → local query cache.

Keith and Jonathan also ask an important, fundamental question: “What is data?” As it turns out, there are two non-overlapping definitions. They also define a third term, “tidy,” and what it actually means for data to be tidy.

Understanding these two definitions of data, what it means for data to be tidy, and the inner workings of the Tableau query process, will give you a deeper, relational understanding of your work in Tableau.