Likelihood to Recommend Actian matrix is not good for small data sets. If you have a limited data pool, or do not plan on having multiple users/clients accessing a data source, stick with a more traditional relational database model - Access for the truly small user base, or a DB2 or Oracle back end if your going to have multiple users, and moderate sized data. Actian is for LARGE data sets (Big Data, in the industry parlance). Millions of rows of data from multiple sources with various down stream systems accessing the database. It is for data analytics of large data groups and intense data mining.
Read full review If you're already using Office 365, Power BI for O365 is an easy choice. Start playing around with the free version and then easily add individual Pro licenses with little risk. However, if you anticipate using this with many users, it can get expensive quickly.
Read full review Pros Super fast. Aggregate query such as SUM(), Count() returns result within seconds from a table with more than billion records. Excellent data compression. Easy maintenance. We managed this database without having a full time DBA. Support ANSI SQL and ODBC/JDBC. It's easy to connect to this database from other systems. Read full review Easy to make visual dashboards from SQL queries. Previously we had to use a third party application that had to run on a web server that was so complex to setup and run. PowerBI removes all that. Ability to control who/which group has access to each dashboard or report. Ties in well with the rest of the Office 365 ecosystem. Has many connectors to allow pulling data from various systems, both onsite (via gateway) or external (via APIs), and join the data to create a report/dashboard. Ability to show data but also export the data, if permitted. Easy to show PowerBI dashboards on SharePoint or on other websites via embedded code. Read full review Cons Some of the bugs were annoying and QA definitely needs improvement Connectivity to Informatica and ETL providers Workload management could be better like when you compare with Teradata Read full review Licensing: Currently, Microsoft has a fixed pricing model for Office 365 users, regardless of role/function of the user. Most organizations have a small number of "power users" that create usable content and many more "consumers" that simply view/run reports created by power users. Microsoft does not differentiate between these users, and thus the pricing limits organizations from large deployments of the software. Version incompatibility: Excel 2010 and 2013 workbooks are compatible with each other. However, workbooks created in 2010 that include PowerPivot databases must be upgraded to 2013 format to run in 2013. Subsequently, you cannot open these upgraded PowerPivot workbooks in 2010. This requires ALL users to be on the same version. Visualization: Excel charting with PowerPivot workbooks is adequate for many users. Power View also contains a number of GREAT visualizations, including animated bubble charts and a very flexible dashboard/report design canvas. However, compared to some of the other self-service BI solutions, it is still limited in its visualization capabilities. Read full review Likelihood to Renew I will continue to recommend this suite to folks looking for a reporting and analytics solution, as I find in MOST cases, it's great at meeting almost every requirement I've been given by a multitude of clients across a range of industries. I've built Capacity Planning solutions that allowed end user input which was then submitted to SharePoint, Executive Dashboards, custom applications, simple analytical tools for teams to easily slice and dice data, and super simple reports as well as some very complicated ones. If you haven't seen the demos online, do a search, and see for yourself - this is a great BI suite! (I do not work for Microsoft, although I do consult out there from time to time. I do occasionally make a recommendation for a different BI reporting tool, but in general, find Excel can accomplish quite a bit for less money and in less time.)
Read full review Usability I wish to give higher rating for the speed and efficiency in handling the queries, but only 6 because of consistent bugs we encounter
Read full review We are satisfied with the functionality and capabilities of Power BI. Product is cost effective and full-fill the reporting requirements of the organization. You can perform most of the report level complex analysis with the help of DAX which makes Power BI very powerful analytic tool. Power BI for Office 365 has gone away and Power BI is the next evolution of it. Power BI comes with your Office 365 E5 subscription or you can purchase licensing for it separately.
Read full review Support Rating Faster initial response Trained professionals Very helpful in resolving issues Read full review as of now there is strong community for Power BI, you can get solution for most of your problems from there. Also you can send your error to Microsoft as well. After every 15 days they release updates to overcome all the issues of defects.
Read full review Implementation Rating Leader failover setup is the toughest and lack of proper documentation is making things tough.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Actian Matrix is our first big data analytics storage platform, and as I was not involved in the POC process to compare it to other products out on the market, unfortunately I cannot say if it is better than other Big Data storage options. I can say that it out performs products such as Oracle or UDB in regards to the volume of data it can easily index and handle.
Read full review Oracle was nice, super expensive to implement if it's not in use already. JobDiva is choppy and heavy on the system while does not give great reports.
Salesforce is good; remote access is good however their support is terrible
Read full review Return on Investment ROI is great, less spending on full time DBA and that money could be use to add additional node. Negative - Not many developers are well aware of this tool, it takes some time to learn. Read full review As a Microsoft Partner implementing Business Intelligence solutions, Power BI has removed the barrier for our clients to begin the "BI journey". So often, projects get hung up in that early phase of procuring and installing/configuring expensive hardware and software. Just simply getting started and designing a beginning solution has allowed our clients to see results in 1-2 weeks using their data that might have taken months to achieve otherwise. One significant ROI example is process improvement. In many cases, individuals or teams are spending days each month gathering data from multiple sources for reporting to their constituents. We are reducing these times to minutes by automating many of the data collection and integration processes that were previously manual. Read full review ScreenShots