An Analytic Data Engine for Visualization in Tableau

Summary: Specialized analytic data engine tightly coupled with Tableau 6.0 for interactive visualization, inspired by column-oriented stores. Describes architecture, query pipeline, and evaluation on real-world visualization scenarios to show performance gains. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 4530
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2011
Pagerank: 7.6208919e-05
Overall Rank: 3,230 | 77.85%
DOI: 10.1145/1989323.1989449

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Richard Wesley (Tableau Research)
2. Matthew Eldridge (Tableau Research)
3. Pawel Terlecki (Tableau Research)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{wesley_sigmod11,
        title = {{An Analytic Data Engine for Visualization in Tableau}},
        author = {Wesley, Richard and Eldridge, Matthew and Terlecki, Pawel},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '11},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/1989323.1989449},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1989323.1989449},
        year = {2011}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 8 of 8 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,472	M4: A Visualization-Oriented Time Series Data Aggregation	2014	VLDB	0.00010668946
2,686	On Improving User Response Times in Tableau	2015	SIGMOD	8.25822e-05
3,288	I've Seen "Enough": Incrementally Improving Visualizations to Support Rapid Decision Making	2017	VLDB	7.5578177e-05
5,056	The Case for Data Visualization Management Systems	2014	VLDB	6.3823595e-05
5,927	Incremental Computation of Common Windowed Holistic Aggregates	2016	VLDB	6.0384172e-05
6,028	Hillview: A trillion-cell spreadsheet for big data	2019	VLDB	6.0019322e-05
6,918	Leveraging Compression in the Tableau Data Engine	2014	SIGMOD	5.7392935e-05
11,844	Interactive Visualization for Big Spatial Data	2019	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 7 of 7 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
12	C-Store: A Column-oriented DBMS	2005	VLDB	0.00069513174
14	MonetDB/X100: Hyper-Pipelining Query Execution	2005	CIDR	0.0006312782
68	The End of an Architectural Era (It’s Time for a Complete Rewrite)	2007	VLDB	0.00038446206
345	Column-Stores vs. Row-Stores: How Different Are They Really?	2008	SIGMOD	0.00020656723
1,562	Estimating Progress of Execution for SQL Queries	2004	SIGMOD	0.00010354429
2,005	Practical Predicate Placement	1994	SIGMOD	9.3203144e-05
6,428	Data Warehouse Technology by Infobright	2009	SIGMOD	5.8807378e-05

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