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."It integrates better with other Microsoft products. It is very easy to use and has very powerful visualizations. It has also got a lot of development going on."
"The reports are easy to create."
"It's pretty easy to set up the product."
"The user experience is easy. Users get familiar with it quickly."
"It is easy to use. It has got a desktop where people can develop their own dashboards. Basically, we have figured out how to connect finance contracts and all programs for the government agency. So, they can see everything in a dashboard. So, it is very easy to use from a technical standpoint of view."
"Ease of development and maintenance."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"Its seamless integration with Microsoft products, such as Microsoft SQL Server or Microsoft Excel, is the most valuable."
"For my business requirements, the performance is good."
"We have many users, between 50 and 100 using the SQL Server product."
"I use the menu on the management view credit section to get information from the database."
"I have found that SQL Server works very well in the Microsoft Dynamics environment."
"The initial setup is easy, flawless."
"The most valuable feature would most likely be querying. We query a lot, we use a lot of stored procedures. As for other features, such as replication and all other more fancy features we don't use them the most. I do not know, but perhaps the DBAs would be the best people who know of the features that they use, but as far as how I use it, it's just for querying and running stored procedures. We use the bare minimum features."
"The initial setup is time-efficient and can be done independently."
"can extract data from the server and store it in a local data source for BI purposes."
"If you need data in real-time, it's not an ideal solution."
"It's not user-friendly; more tutorials, training, and better documentation would be helpful."
"I think because I'm moving more into RPA, I'd definitely like to see integration across the RPA, Power BI, or Tableau platforms, because that integration could then make automation and mundane reporting much faster."
"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."
"I would like to see a change in the premium capacity."
"They can improve it in terms of rule-based security. Currently, it has very limited rules."
"The product doesn't support unstructured data. It doesn't support video, streaming, and strings of files."
"The initial setup is a little bit technical."
"CAL licenses should cost less. Microsoft usually prices high for client access licenses. Server plus user client access license (CAL) licensing requires a separate Server license for each server on which the software is installed, plus a user CAL for each user accessing the server."
"SQL Server could improve by being more user-friendly, it is still geared towards specialists. Additionally, the monitoring system is difficult to use, not everyone can use it well. The configuration should be able to be done through the GUI."
"It's difficult to make changes. It's a very complicated product in general — that's the issue."
"For a big amount of data, when we are speaking about IoT Segments, and Big Data projects, there are performance issues."
"The solution’s initial setup could be complex, requiring some design of how you want to lay everything out and what type of storage you want to put certain things on."
"The solution could improve by being more user-friendly."
"The performance could be better."
"It would definitely be better if SQL Server were free."
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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