9 ms·

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

46 points by jerianasmith 9y ago

nhance 9y ago
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, so I'm excited to see this published here. Gives me faith that I'm making the right call (even if it is a bit painful to develop for these things. XML and all.)
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  >"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." I wish you luck, but do bear in mind that support considerations are very important in the business world, especially businesses where IT services are in a supporting role to the main business. With that in mind, I'd hazard a guess that XML is one of the least problematic parts of what you're working with.
- mistermann 9y ago
  > Many of the developers I've seen working in this space seem a few years behind Could you be more specific what you're referring to here? As it is developing it seems to me like there is a very high chance of companies ending up with a tangled mess of things, but wondering if you're seeing different issues than me.
- gaius 9y ago
  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?
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > 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.
    - ZenoArrow 9y ago
      Which Office tier doesn't come with the Power BI tools in Excel?
tryitnow 9y ago
Pretty much everything mentioned in this post is standard fare among the major self-service BI vendors now - and if they don't have it it's on their roadmap. I would say the big advantages of Power BI are 1) Cost: In some cases it's an almost 5:1 cost advantage 2) User Community: Far more important than costs. There's a ton of third-party resources (books, blogs, forums, etc) on how to get the most out of Power BI's underlying technologies: DAX and M. I think you're going to be more likely to find a Power BI meetup in your city than one for another BI vendor.
- arethuza 9y ago
  I'd say that biggest advantage Power BI has is that its plugged right into the Office 365/Azure world.
vijucat 9y ago
I found Power BI's natural language Q & A to be the real killer feature that Tableau, et al currently don't have. https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-service-how-to-use-q-and-a/ https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-se... It actually works 90% of the time and helps you answer fairly complicated questions about your data set, visualize them and add them to your dashboard.
arethuza 9y ago
I was pretty impressed how easy it is to create new custom visuals for Power BI in R.
- alexilliamson 9y ago
  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?
  - scottmcdot 9y ago
    I believe Qlik Sense has an R plugin but you'd need to have the R session running somewhere.
karmicthreat 9y ago
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/ 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.
- benlower 9y ago
  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.
- samch 9y ago
  Just curious why Tibco Spotfire was omitted from your process. If you're looking at Qlik, Spotfire is pretty feature-similar.
  - karmicthreat 9y ago
    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.
- pinneycolton 9y ago
  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.
dmlab 9y ago
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.
- jerianasmith 9y ago
  Have you tried free or Premium Version ? There are many more options with Premium Version.It's better to talk to experts before forming one's opinion.
scottmcdot 9y ago
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?
- jerianasmith 9y ago
  Hi Scott, Though I'm not moving to Qlik but has read about comparisons between top few analytics tools including Qlik, Power BI, Tableau, QS etc. Out of all, QlikView is highly adaptable and provides wide-ranging deep analytics. It also has integrations to Deltek products, so if you use Deltek for time & expense or earned value management (EVM) reporting, QlikView is a natural choice. Overall, QlikView also continues to have one of the industry’s highest customer satisfaction ratings. On the other hand, Microsoft’s Power BI is inexpensive and plugs-in seamlessly with MS Office. It is a solid option if you need quick access to specific analytics or intensive reporting (and have personnel who are skilled in MS-based data queries). In the long run it may challenge QlikView, Tableau or other analytics tools. Microsoft Power BI is the only one of these three data visualization and analytics apps that have extensive R and big data-related integrations, ensuring this specific apps’ scalability for larger projects.

46 points by jerianasmith 9y ago

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, so I'm excited to see this published here. Gives me faith that I'm making the right call (even if it is a bit painful to develop for these things. XML and all.)

ZenoArrow 9y ago
>"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." I wish you luck, but do bear in mind that support considerations are very important in the business world, especially businesses where IT services are in a supporting role to the main business. With that in mind, I'd hazard a guess that XML is one of the least problematic parts of what you're working with.
mistermann 9y ago
> Many of the developers I've seen working in this space seem a few years behind Could you be more specific what you're referring to here? As it is developing it seems to me like there is a very high chance of companies ending up with a tangled mess of things, but wondering if you're seeing different issues than me.
gaius 9y ago
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?
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > 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.
  - ZenoArrow 9y ago
    Which Office tier doesn't come with the Power BI tools in Excel?

tryitnow 9y ago

Pretty much everything mentioned in this post is standard fare among the major self-service BI vendors now - and if they don't have it it's on their roadmap. I would say the big advantages of Power BI are 1) Cost: In some cases it's an almost 5:1 cost advantage 2) User Community: Far more important than costs. There's a ton of third-party resources (books, blogs, forums, etc) on how to get the most out of Power BI's underlying technologies: DAX and M. I think you're going to be more likely to find a Power BI meetup in your city than one for another BI vendor.

arethuza 9y ago
I'd say that biggest advantage Power BI has is that its plugged right into the Office 365/Azure world.

vijucat 9y ago

I found Power BI's natural language Q & A to be the real killer feature that Tableau, et al currently don't have. https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-service-how-to-use-q-and-a/ https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/powerbi-se... It actually works 90% of the time and helps you answer fairly complicated questions about your data set, visualize them and add them to your dashboard.

arethuza 9y ago

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

alexilliamson 9y ago
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?
- scottmcdot 9y ago
  I believe Qlik Sense has an R plugin but you'd need to have the R session running somewhere.

karmicthreat 9y ago

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/ 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.

benlower 9y ago
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.
samch 9y ago
Just curious why Tibco Spotfire was omitted from your process. If you're looking at Qlik, Spotfire is pretty feature-similar.
- karmicthreat 9y ago
  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.
pinneycolton 9y ago
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.

dmlab 9y ago

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.

jerianasmith 9y ago
Have you tried free or Premium Version ? There are many more options with Premium Version.It's better to talk to experts before forming one's opinion.

scottmcdot 9y ago

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?

jerianasmith 9y ago
Hi Scott, Though I'm not moving to Qlik but has read about comparisons between top few analytics tools including Qlik, Power BI, Tableau, QS etc. Out of all, QlikView is highly adaptable and provides wide-ranging deep analytics. It also has integrations to Deltek products, so if you use Deltek for time & expense or earned value management (EVM) reporting, QlikView is a natural choice. Overall, QlikView also continues to have one of the industry’s highest customer satisfaction ratings. On the other hand, Microsoft’s Power BI is inexpensive and plugs-in seamlessly with MS Office. It is a solid option if you need quick access to specific analytics or intensive reporting (and have personnel who are skilled in MS-based data queries). In the long run it may challenge QlikView, Tableau or other analytics tools. Microsoft Power BI is the only one of these three data visualization and analytics apps that have extensive R and big data-related integrations, ensuring this specific apps’ scalability for larger projects.