Hortonworks Data Platform vs. Microsoft BI (MSBI)

I find HDP easy to use and solves most of the problems for people looking to manage their big data. Evaluating the Hortonworks Data Platform is easy as it is free to download and install in your cluster. Single node cluster available as Sandbox is also easy for POCs.

Incentivized

Microsoft BI has a lot of features and is a very powerful tool, especially if you have folks on your team that know how to utilize all of its capabilities. To truly unlock all that it can do, it does require people to have a deep understanding of its capabilities. That's where the software really shines. If you are looking for a simpler, more basic reporting tool, there are other programs available that do not require such a steep learning curve.

Incentivized

• It does a good job of packaging a lot of big data components into bundles and lets you use the ones you are interested in or need. It supports an extensive list of components which lets us solve many problems.
• It provides the ability to manage installations and maintenance using Apache Ambari. It helps us in using management packs to install/upgrade components easily. It also helps us add, remove components, add, remove hosts, perform upgrades in a convenient manner. It also provides alerts and notifications and monitors the environment.
• What they excel in is packaging open source components that are relevant and are useful to solve and complement each other as well as contribute to enhancing those components. They do a great job in the community to keep on top of what would be useful to users, fixing bugs and working with other companies and individuals to make the platform better.

Incentivized

• Comparatively easy to use compared to other data analytics solutions, collaborating with other colleagues on data work is simple.
• Using Visual Studio for database, ETL, reporting, and analytics development save time and money.
• Transfer of data from one application to another via Excel and comparison of data attributes between applications
• Dashboard functionality, as well as Python support, are available, allowing you to add additional charts and graphs.

Incentivized

• Since it doesn't come with propriety tools for big data management, additional integration is need (for query handling, search, etc).
• It was very straightforward to store clinical data without relations, such as data from sensors of a medical device. But it has limitations when needed to combine the data with other clinical data in structured format (e.g. lab results, diagnosis).
• Overall look and feel of front-end management tools (e.g. monitoring) are not good. It is not bad but it doesn't look professional.

Incentivized

• MSBI designs can work on increasing data processing capabilities enough to handle the huge datasets etc.
• It would be a lot better if it is a little low on cost.
• it needs to create opportunities little more than they do regarding customization of some very unique visualization effects

Microsoft BI is fundamental to our suite of BI applications. That being said, Northcraft Analytics is focused on delighting our customers, so if the underlying factors of our decision change, we would choose to re-write our BI applications on a different stack. Luckily, mathematics are the fundamental IP of our technology... and is portable across all BI platforms for the foreseeable future.

The Microsoft BI tools have great usability for both developers and end users alike. For developers familiar with Visual Studio, there is little learning curve. For those not, the single Visual Studio IDE means not having to learn separate tools for each component. For end-users, the web interface for SSRS is simple to navigate with intuitive controls. For ad-hoc analysis, Excel can connect directly to SSAS and provide a pivot table like experience which is familiar to many users. For database development, there is beginning to be some confusion, as there are now three tool choices (VS, SSMS, Azure Data Studio) for developers. I would like to see Azure Data Studio become the superset of SSMS and eventually supplant it.

Incentivized

The product has been reliable.

SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) can drag at times. We created two report servers and placed them under an F5 load balancer. This configuration has worked well. We have seen sluggish performance at times due to the Windows Firewall.

MSBI natively has a site that allows you to vote on user enhancements and bug fixes. This allows the largest nagging issues to float to the top and the development team can prioritize accordingly. As mentioned earlier, the large community base of MSBI developers assist technical resources in handling technical questions.

Incentivized

This training was more directed toward what the product was capable of rather than actual programming.

I have used on-line training from Microsoft and from Pragmatic Works. I would recommend Pragmatic Works as the best way to get up to speed quickly, and then use the Microsoft on-line training to deep dive into specific features that you need to get depth with.

Try not to change variable names.

Incentivized

We are a consulting firm and as such our best resources are always billing on client projects. Our internal implementation has weaknesses, but that's true for any company like ours. My rating is based on the product's ease of implementation.

We chose [Hortonworks Data Platform] because it's free and because [it] was an IBM partner, suggested as big data platform after biginsights platform.

You can install in more physical computer without high specs, then you can use it in order to learn how to deploy, configure a complete big data cluster.

We installed also in a cloud infrastructure of 5 virtual machine

Incentivized

We have used the built in ConnectWise Manager reports and custom reports. The reports provide static data. PowerBI shows us live data we can drill down into and easily adjust parameters. It's much more useful than a static PDF report.

Incentivized

• It is difficult to have a negative impact, because the required investment is not that high.
• The big open community behind Hortonworks and related Apache Project makes it easy to put 'the wheel to meet the road' quite quickly.
• We have seen management meetings where the attendants were impressed by the results achieved with the datalake built on HDP.

Incentivized

• As a SaaS provider we see being able to provide self-service BI to our client users as a competitive advantage. In fact the MSSQL enabled BI is a contributing factor to many winning RFPs we have done for prospective client organisations.
• However MSSQL BI requires extensive knowledge and skills to design and develop data warehouses & data models as a foundation to support business analysts and users to interrogate data effectively and efficiently. Often times we find having strong in-house MSSQL expertise is a bless.

Incentivized