We performed a comparison between Microsoft Power BI and SQL Server based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Microsoft, Tableau, Oracle and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools."In my opinion, Microsoft BI is a low-cost solution, and it could be an interesting solution for a tourism company."
"The product is intuitive and user-friendly."
"The most valuable features are the flexibility, how many ways you can interrogate the data, and the the graphical visualization."
"Easy to use. End-users can make changes to the graphics."
"The stability is good."
"It provides good visibility."
"The initial setup is relatively simple."
"The most useful features are the ability to connect different databases to Microsoft BI and explore them. Once the database information has been extracted, you have the ability to construct indicators and dashboards from the information."
"The solution has proven to be very stable."
"SQL Server and their offers are very good. You can switch over, export, and do other things."
"It is a stable product, and it runs seamlessly. It is not complex."
"The ability to see tables, reviews, and custom script options is good."
"I've been using SQL Server for 20 years, and there is nothing that it can't do. It is awesome."
"The solution has a reliable database."
"Stability and usability, which is quite simple, are two of the solution's most valuable features."
"The solution has the capability to scale."
"The upgrade process could be improved."
"Anything they can do to improve enterprise collaboration is going to help people get set up and utilize the solution."
"Not having to login again after a mobile app upgrade. A simple login on mobile would be great."
"The mobile app is very poor."
"We did have some issues building the Microsoft blog."
"I would like Microsoft to include some inbuilt machine learning so that it becomes point-and-click, rather than us developing models out of API and BI connecting to that and getting the results. That process gets in the way of continuity."
"It is kept very current, and there is an update literally every month. However, the interface changes quite randomly with no documentation, which is difficult at the domain and architectural level where you're planning things and engaging the business. Things change frequently, and you wonder where has the button for the new report gone. They should provide better documentation on interface changes. It should be better optimized. It is supposed to be a data integration tool, but it is doing relatively simple queries. It has its limitations. For example, you can only pull a number of columns. So, there is room for optimization on its ability to integrate multiple data sources. The desktop tool is very memory-intensive, and again, this is not documented clearly. It requires a heavy CPU and memory use, and it causes your operating systems to become unstable. I would like to see the ability to create datasets within Power BI. Microsoft is promoting Azure as a cloud solution, but it is dependent upon a desktop component, which seems a little bit deceptive. Data set is the basic element that you report from, but it has to be created on the desktop and then published to the cloud. So, you're in the cloud, and you create a data structure or the data flow, but you can't report from that. You have to leave the cloud, go to your desktop, create the data set on your desktop, and publish it to the cloud. You go back to the cloud and create your report by using that published data set, which is very non-intuitive. If you go to the Microsoft Power BI community, this is a common complaint across the entire community."
"When I create measures, sometimes the error messages aren't clear. It makes me spend more time searching for solutions. I need the error messages to be more specific. So, I would like clearer error messages when creating measures."
"The solution is expensive. The licensing costs are high."
"The tool needs to improve its pricing and technical support."
"The performance needs some improvement and it needs more features integrated into it."
"The remote access aspect needs to be improved in terms of security."
"For a big amount of data, when we are speaking about IoT Segments, and Big Data projects, there are performance issues."
"The installation process should be simplified."
"The security features of the solution could be better."
"The way to make cursors and manage raw data in rows can be improved. Currently, the way to construct or build these cursors is very hard, and you can waste memory. You need a highly skilled person to make it more efficient. It can also have support for Cubes, which is the organization of data in different dimensions by using MDX languages."
Microsoft Power BI is ranked 1st in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools with 297 reviews while SQL Server is ranked 1st in Relational Databases Tools with 260 reviews. Microsoft Power BI is rated 8.0, while SQL Server is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Microsoft Power BI writes "A complete ecosystem with an builtin ETL tool, good integrations with python and R, and support of DAX and Power Query (M languages)". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SQL Server writes "Easy to use and provides good speed and data recovery". Microsoft Power BI is most compared with Tableau, Amazon QuickSight, KNIME, Domo and Oracle OBIEE, whereas SQL Server is most compared with MariaDB, SAP HANA, Oracle Database, LocalDB and IBM Db2 Database.
We monitor all BI (Business Intelligence) Tools reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
