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Power BI, Microsoft’s Business Intelligence set of tools, is getting smarter

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Re: Power BI, Microsoft’s Business Intelligence set of tools, is getting smarter

#11

Post by dragonwriter »

gaius wrote: post #9
nhance wrote: post #2

I've recently switched to start working with Microsoft products, with both this and their Dynamics 365 platform. It really seems like there's a huge opportunity here for guys like me to bring years of experience hacking on UNIX systems into the Microsoft world because there's a lot of "this is how it's done" and legacy systems thinking. Many of the developers I've seen working in this space seem a few years behind, s…

I'm curious too, what you mean here. Azure is cutting edge, HDinsight is world class. The stuff they are doing with R is great. Even Excel probably does a lot of things you don't realize, do you know it comes with a built-in in-memory columnar DB and a Facebook client now?

> Even Excel probably does a lot of things you don't realize, do you know it comes with a built-in in-memory columnar DB

...if you have the right Office tier.

Re: Power BI, Microsoft’s Business Intelligence set of tools, is getting smarter

#12

Post by karmicthreat »

I recently compared Qlik, Power BI and Tableau as a reporting system for our customers. I would say Qlik was the most eager out of the 3. They got me in contact with their OEM team and were very forthcoming with information. Microsoft gives you all the information you could want up front. Tableau never responded.

Power BI also has Power BI embedded for Azure services which bills report views on a per session basis. This might be what wins me over to Power BI if it makes financial sense.

R also has https://shiny.rstudio.com/ which is pretty neat as well.

In the end we would like our small/medium sized customers to build on top of this platform so we will probably stick to one of the big 3 rather than completely roll our own.

Re: Power BI, Microsoft’s Business Intelligence set of tools, is getting smarter

#13

Post by samch »

karmicthreat wrote: post #12

I recently compared Qlik, Power BI and Tableau as a reporting system for our customers. I would say Qlik was the most eager out of the 3. They got me in contact with their OEM team and were very forthcoming with information. Microsoft gives you all the information you could want up front. Tableau never responded. Power BI also has Power BI embedded for Azure services which bills report views on a per session basis. T…

Just curious why Tibco Spotfire was omitted from your process. If you're looking at Qlik, Spotfire is pretty feature-similar.

Re: Power BI, Microsoft’s Business Intelligence set of tools, is getting smarter

#14

Post by dmlab »

We recently looked over PowerBI and it didn't cut it. Crude mapcharts & limited viz capabilities. Lots of tools feature R integration. If your small to medium organization goes down the MS dynamix route then it may be worthwhile. There was a lot of potential there but not enough finished features to move us off the hybrid BI approach.

Re: Power BI, Microsoft’s Business Intelligence set of tools, is getting smarter

#15

Post by karmicthreat »

samch wrote: post #13
karmicthreat wrote: post #12

I recently compared Qlik, Power BI and Tableau as a reporting system for our customers. I would say Qlik was the most eager out of the 3. They got me in contact with their OEM team and were very forthcoming with information. Microsoft gives you all the information you could want up front. Tableau never responded. Power BI also has Power BI embedded for Azure services which bills report views on a per session basis. T…

Just curious why Tibco Spotfire was omitted from your process. If you're looking at Qlik, Spotfire is pretty feature-similar.

Because I didn't know anyone that had used it. Nor had it come up in other conversations. At 200$/User it is probably going to be out of our price range.

Thanks for pointing it out though. I will dig around and see if it is a contender for our use case.

Re: Power BI, Microsoft’s Business Intelligence set of tools, is getting smarter

#16

Post by benlower »

karmicthreat wrote: post #12

I recently compared Qlik, Power BI and Tableau as a reporting system for our customers. I would say Qlik was the most eager out of the 3. They got me in contact with their OEM team and were very forthcoming with information. Microsoft gives you all the information you could want up front. Tableau never responded. Power BI also has Power BI embedded for Azure services which bills report views on a per session basis. T…

Sorry to hear that you didn't get the information you needed from Tableau. If you're still interested in connecting I can make that happen. My team is responsible for Tableau's dev platform and our APIs are used for integrations, customization, and embedding. Email bklower@tableau.com.

Re: Power BI, Microsoft’s Business Intelligence set of tools, is getting smarter

#17

Post by pinneycolton »

karmicthreat wrote: post #12

I recently compared Qlik, Power BI and Tableau as a reporting system for our customers. I would say Qlik was the most eager out of the 3. They got me in contact with their OEM team and were very forthcoming with information. Microsoft gives you all the information you could want up front. Tableau never responded. Power BI also has Power BI embedded for Azure services which bills report views on a per session basis. T…

Don't forget that PowerBI also has R embedded/integrated. There are some limitations in how you can use R to produce custom visualizations, but this tight integration is a real plus, in my opinion. Combined with the Excel-like functionality that is also embedded in PowerBI for data reshaping, PowerBI has a clear advantage in terms of flexibility and raw power. I personally can't speak to Qlik, but PowerBI has Tableau beat in this respect. Much of the data reshaping etc. in Tableau happens outside of Tableau. This can introduce some challenges in process.

Re: Power BI, Microsoft’s Business Intelligence set of tools, is getting smarter

#18

Post by scottmcdot »

I work for a large organisation using Qlikview and there is currently a migration underway to Qlik Sense. To me, Power BI looks similar to the features that Qlik Sense provides. Is anyone out there considering moving from Qlik to Power BI?

Re: Power BI, Microsoft’s Business Intelligence set of tools, is getting smarter

#19

Post by scottmcdot »

alexilliamson wrote: post #10
arethuza wrote: post #7

I was pretty impressed how easy it is to create new custom visuals for Power BI in R.

The integration with R is awesome. I was amazed to see that you can create a chart with R code - with ggplot for instance - along side "native" power BI charts, and the ggplot graphic responds to filters and other report-level manipulation the same as others. Do other BI products do this?

I believe Qlik Sense has an R plugin but you'd need to have the R session running somewhere.

Re: Power BI, Microsoft’s Business Intelligence set of tools, is getting smarter

#20

Post by ZenoArrow »

dragonwriter wrote: post #11
gaius wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious too, what you mean here. Azure is cutting edge, HDinsight is world class. The stuff they are doing with R is great. Even Excel probably does a lot of things you don't realize, do you know it comes with a built-in in-memory columnar DB and a Facebook client now?

> Even Excel probably does a lot of things you don't realize, do you know it comes with a built-in in-memory columnar DB ...if you have the right Office tier.

Which Office tier doesn't come with the Power BI tools in Excel?
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