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, SAP and others in BI (Business Intelligence) Tools."I like data modeling. You can connect with your database, which is quite useful for me. It is a good tool if you have a large amount of data and you want to gather different data and interconnect it. The Power Query functionality is quite an interesting feature. If you have a query in Excel, you can also copy your query and run it in Power BI. Its dashboard is also very nice and not complicated. You don't need to be a developer to be able to use it. I am not an IT guy, and it is quite easy to use for somebody who is not an IT person."
"Very intuitive and easy to use."
"The uploading of information is very easy, as you just use an Excel sheet to start work right away and obtain the benefits of Power BI."
"Helped identify bad data, enabling the corrections needed to the data for management."
"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."
"It provides easy integration with Office tools."
"Premium features that used to cost $5,000 per company per month recently became a lot more accessible. Microsoft recently implemented a per user feature in Power BI Premium; it's $20 per month."
"The most valuable features in Microsoft BI are the analysis using the feature drag and drop function. It's very easy to load and use different data sources."
"I like that it's relatively stable."
"The solution is easy to use, has rich feature sets, and is business-oriented."
"The solution is very intuitive and easy to use."
"You could have an offsite and an onsite, and if the onsite goes down, the offsite picks it up. I like that flexibility to provide continuing operations."
"The installation was straightforward. We did not have a large installation and it took a couple of weeks to complete."
"I like that the new version has a memory-optimized table to improve the performance."
"We use it for our on-premises solutions, virtual servers and SSAS, SSRS packages. Also, our applications are .NET based, so it made to use it."
"The latest version supports for big data analytics. SQL Server's vector processing-based batch execution mode is now available to the entire execution of R or Python code. Since much of the work that tends to be done in R and Python involves aggregation, batch mode - which processes rows of data several at a time, can be very helpful."
"The formatting template could be improved."
"There needs to be improved guidance and documentation for the initial setup of Power BI as it currently remains complex."
"BI is scalable, but there are some problems with limited online storage."
"Drill-down in dashboards needs to improved. The capability only works in Power BI Desktop today. We need to have an alternative approach today."
"Its setup and support should be improved. We would like to see more material for developers that provides clear explanations about how we can do data mining by using Microsoft BI. It would also be good if we can connect a feature to other customized machine learning solutions."
"It should have more integrations."
"There's always room for improvement for Microsoft Power BI, especially for the UX and the menus to make it more accessible to business users."
"I would like to be able to use SQL properly within the reports and allow multiple people to work on the same report at the same time. If one person is working on it, then it causes issues for anyone else wanting to make reports."
"Analysis services have a lot of room for improvement. Basically, manageability on the available tools. They should have improved them already. They are not very efficient. My main headache is with the analysis service, and it would be really good if Microsoft developed some additional tools that are more user-friendly to manage the analysis. This is both from the perspective of management, users' roles, and performance analysis. My main wish for SQL Server would be that management tools for analysis services grow and mature a bit."
"Sometimes we experience issues with its stability."
"SQL Server needs to improve in performance and monitoring because there are no specific monitoring solutions to detect and analyze events for issues in the database. You have to use another monitoring solution. If Microsoft could provide an update to this solution or provide a monitoring solution specifically for SQL Server, it would be very valuable."
"It needs to be improved to handle big data for large volumes of transactions for big industries. As compared to Oracle Database, SQL Server is not suitable for big data or large organizations where the database size could be more than 100 GB or more. In our country, for a large database and a large volume of transactions, we normally use Oracle Database. Most of the large banks are shifting from SQL Server to Oracle Database because of its slowness."
"We experience latency at times when there is a lot of data being processed."
"In the next release, I would like to see a better user interface and a familiar syntax."
"We want to move to Azure, and the solution could be made better to make the process easier for the migration from on-premise to the cloud."
"SQL Server could improve by increase the performance, it cannot handle large amounts of data. I did not find any additional features compared to others solutions."
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.
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