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."What I like most is that I can do everything in Power BI that I can do in Excel."
"I like that I can use Power BI to upload data. That is very important for me. The visualization is also convenient and easy to use."
"Power BI is more powerful than other tools because it is new for us. Each new version has more capabilities, and we're expecting AI and ML features in the next version."
"My favorite feature is the power query editor, where it can do the data transformations."
"Good reporting and data analysis tool that's user-friendly, easy to deploy, stable, and scalable."
"It integrates with all of the Microsoft tools."
"It is very good, and it supports the Microsoft ecosystem, including Excel, etc."
"I think the visualization part is valuable."
"It is quite reliable in cluster configurations and has helped me to reduce downtime and improve SLAs."
"The product has very good online documentation that can be used for troubleshooting."
"SQL Server is a very mature solution."
"It's a good learning environment, it's easy enough to learn and understand. Anybody that picks up the language early on will be able to develop in it."
"The initial setup is time-efficient and can be done independently."
"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."
"It is easy to manage for the administrator. It is also easy to use for applications that are Windows-based. It is a very stable product, and it has got backup and recovery tools."
"I have found SQL Server easy to use."
"We found out that you can't share a report with others unless you have an additional package. That caught us off guard. It came as a program that somebody could go in, build a report, and show it, but you can't share it without having additional licenses."
"Trend data and dashboards need improvement."
"Better mapping capabilities and easier administration access would be beneficial, especially for understanding who has viewed reports."
"We would like to have better SQL support for queries."
"This solution is resource-heavy."
"Microsoft BI comes under pressure when there is a lot of data to be crunched. It gets slower and slower, and the functionality becomes a bit of a problem. The performance goes down with data being fed into the system. The infrastructure requirement also increases if you have to increase the performance. This is the area that can be improved in my opinion. Initially, the product is good, but over the years, when data gets accumulated, it becomes a problem unless the old data is kind of archived and is no longer shown on the visualization. It has a feature by using which a user can query for a report through simple questions to a bot. So, if I want to look for the customer share of revenue by geography, I just simply state that in the chatbot. If I wanted it in a pie chart, then you say, "Please show it to me in a pie chart." It comes out well for basic charts. This feature should be improvised more so that people can very quickly get customized reports on the go."
"Power BI shows reports on actual data, not metadata."
"The solution could be more customizable and you do not have too much freedom on the code."
"Only one CPU core can be used. Can’t move a database between servers easily. Can’t use triggers."
"It will be very useful to have high-level database monitoring. It should also have built-in business intelligence reporting."
"SQL is a highly unstable server - there are patch updates on the Windows server every week, which is why we only use it for non-critical systems."
"The documentation could be much better. It's lacking right now. If there are better help pages, for even complicated queries and stuff like that that would be quite a help for users."
"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."
"They need to improve their support. It should be faster."
"I would like Microsoft to evolve SQL Server because stateful databases dying are in a way. We would like to find out if it can absorb Hadoop and other similar things. They should make it useful for data mining. Data is evolving forever, and how we store it is also changing constantly. So, SQL Server also needs to change."
"The product overall would benefit from the addition of better tutorials to help master the skills necessary to actually build a project database. Right now, what is available isn't sufficient."
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.
