We performed a comparison between Microsoft BI and SQL Server based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Amazon and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools."I like having the ability to connect Excel files as data inputs."
"What I like about Power BI is how fast you are able to create dashboards and how fast you are able to fetch the data. You can connect to the database or data source, and then you can design your dashboards very easily."
"The solution is easy to use and charts can be built quickly with the tools."
"The flexibility of the program is valuable. We are able to add other information to the reporting information and expand upon it."
"What's most valuable in this tool is that it gives its users detailed error messages. It's a very stable data analytics tool, and it offers good scalability."
"You don't need much support with Microsoft Power BI because it has such a large base of users who can answer your questions on their forums. There are also many video tutorials and webinars available online that offer solutions to whatever problems you may have."
"Like all Microsoft products, it is very easy to set up initially."
"I find Power BI's reporting feature the most valuable. The solution has improved a lot. There are new features getting added day by day. In the past, they didn't even have the printing feature, but now they have it."
"I love SQL Server's Common Table Expression. In addition to that, I like its lead and lag functions. That helped us reduce a lot of code when comparing rows in SQL Server."
"The tool helps us by being available always."
"It is easy to deploy and easy to maintain."
"The technical support that Microsoft provides is great."
"For my business requirements, the performance is good."
"SQL is stable."
"SQL Server is similar to other Microsoft products, such as BI, they are easy to use. You do not need to have an expensive BD to maintain them. All the useful intuitive features you find in Microsoft solutions you will find in SQL Server."
"I like the availability group functionality. We are setting up more clusters using availability groups. The enterprise licensing or Software Assurance makes it a little bit cheaper as well. It is nice to have that read-only copy for reporting and everything else."
"From an improvement perspective, I think if the Power BI developers of that platform would really focus on being more detailed and specific on the error messages, it would help a lot of developers troubleshoot and maintain the report ECT or the dashboard ECT."
"There could be an integrated AI that can automatically analyze some of your data and highlight or provide suggestions. For example, when you are looking at a data set, it can suggest putting it into a certain type of chart so that you gain different insights or a trend line. You would almost have templates that it would recommend for you."
"The handling of the workspaces can be made more granular for user access rights. It can be managed a little bit better in terms of the connection to Active Directory so that we have more granular access rights. I am not sure if this is really possible or if we can solve it differently, but we need a lot of workspaces, and we are not sure how we can deal with it from the access rights perspective."
"The interface could be improved."
"I would like to see more visualization options."
"I'm missing collaborations functionality to operate or to work connected with multiple people on a data source or on virtualization. There should be more collaborations functions, such as in Confluence. We haven't explored the solution sufficiently in this area, but at this time it doesn't look sufficient."
"I find the solution to be 70 percent stable."
"Power BI doesn't support some open-source data sources that are new, such as SnowSQL, Iceberg, or ClickHouse."
"On the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) side, I have noticed more bugs in terms of being able to connect to our SQL servers. I can't tell how many times my recent server list got dropped or cleaned out. It is a pain, and it would be nice to have that recent connect list when you connect in. For whatever reason, once in a while, I get a hard error, and it'll close. When I go back in, everything is cleared out. It is annoying when you are working with more than a hundred database instances."
"Their support could be better. There should be more visibility on the progress of the ticket, and their last line of support should be more knowledgeable. Other than that, we have nothing to complain about."
"Something that could be improved is the cost because it's very high. That's the only thing I'm concerned about but the technology is good."
"I would say that people should know how to get a SQL setup in place since it might be an area where they lack when it comes to the solution."
"Performance could be improved."
"We have no vision. We don't know when or how we have been hacked."
"There should be more security updates for the product."
"When we run into problems, it's usually during installation, and finding answers to the problem has been a nightmare because the documentation is terrible."
Microsoft BI is ranked 1st in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 83 reviews while SQL Server is ranked 1st in Relational Databases Tools with 51 reviews. Microsoft BI is rated 8.0, while SQL Server is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Microsoft BI writes "User friendly, easy to set up and great for analyzing data". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SQL Server writes "Good performance, well-priced, trivial to set up, and helpful support". Microsoft BI is most compared with Amazon QuickSight, Tableau, KNIME, Domo and Oracle OBIEE, whereas SQL Server is most compared with MariaDB, Oracle Database, SAP HANA, LocalDB and Teradata.
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