Visual Interfaces to Data Chris Stolte, Tableau Software Easy-to-use visual interfaces to data can broadly expand the audience for databases. Domain experts rather than database experts can engage in rapid-fire Q&A sessions with the data. Visual interfaces can provide a medium for story-telling, debate, and conversations about the data. They can also put new and challenging demands on the capabilities of traditional relational databases. In this talk, I will describe our formal language-based approach to visual analysis and how the use of a formal language enables us to build user experiences that more effectively support the process of analysis. Tableau's VizQL algebra is a declarative language for succinctly describing visual representations of data and analytics operations on the data. A VizQL statement compiles into the SQL or MDX queries necessary to generate the view and into the graphical commands to render the interactive view of the data. Our easy-to-use drag-and-drop user experiences for analysis and visual interface authoring are built on top of VizQL. I will also discuss the challenges we have faced in getting relational databases "in the wild" to effectively support visual analysis for the average business or scientific user. The challenges range from the technical to the political. Traditional relational databases, both for OLTP and OLAP, often require sophisticated data modeling and data management expertise, optimize for performance based on known workloads, and are designed for scaling to large databases sizes (e.g. PB or TB) on clusters of machines rather than reducing analytic latency using limited hardware. I will describe our approaches to building a database focused on providing interactive query performance on tens or hundreds of millions of rows of data with little or no data modeling and running on a typical knowledge worker desktop machine.