Business intelligence and analytics firm Tableau today announced that it has acquired ClearGraph, a service that lets you query and visualize large amounts of business date through natural language queries (think "this week's transactions over $500"). Tableau expects to integrate this technology with its own products as it looks to make it easier for its users to use similar queries to visualize their data. Typically, you'd have to know SQL or a similar database query language to pull information out of most enterprise databases. Recent advances in natural language processing and machine learning now allow services like ClearGraph to understand more about the underlying database and then take these sentences and essentially translate them into database queries. Given that Microsoft's Power BI and other competitors already offer this capability, it's no surprise that Tableau is also looking into this (though Tableau argues that -- unlike the likes of Microsoft -- it can be a neutral party given that it has no investment in any particular cloud or on-premise technology outside of its own).

Tableau, a Seattle-based business intelligence and analytics provider, announced this morning that it has acquired ClearGraph. Based in Palo Alto, Calif., ClearGraph provides smart data discovery and data analysis natural language query solutions. The purchase price has not been disclosed. ClearGraph was founded in 2014 by investment specialist Andrew Vigneault (CEO) and CTO Ryan Atallah. It is expected that ClearGraph's entire team will join Tableau and help integrate the technologies.