Likelihood to Recommend Microsoft BI is well suited for Stream analytics, easy data integration, report creation and UI/UX designs (limited but what all available are great ones) Microsoft BI may be less appropriate for handling huge number of datasets and difficult queries. It may also be difficult for a company with heavy data.
Read full review Oracle Java SE is well suited to long-running applications (e.g. servers). Java Swing (UI toolkit) is now rather outdated, lacking support for modern UI features. JavaFX, the potential replacement for Swing, has now been separated out of Java core. Ideally, there would be a path to migrate a large application incrementally from Swing to JavaFX, but due to different threading models and other aspects, it is difficult. At this point, it is probably better to use an embedded web browser (e.g. JxBrowser) to provide a modern UI in HTML/Javascript and keep just the business logic in Java.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Plenty support built into the tool and IDE like Maven, Ant, Eclipse, IntelliJ. Strong object-orientation language and clear project structure. Wrapper underlines hardware and memory management so the developers can focus on business and implementation. It offers a huge library and framework support from third-parties and the community. Read full review Cons The race to perfect gathering of Non-Traditional datasets is on-going; with Microsoft arguably not the leader of the pack in this category. Licensing options for PowerBI visualizations may be a factor. I.e. if you need to implement B2C PowerBI visualizations, the cost is considerably high especially for startups. Some clients are still resistant putting their data on the cloud, which restricts lots of functionality to Power BI. Read full review Commercial Licensing in 2019. Oracle will charge commercial organizations using Java SE for upgrading to the latest bug fixes and updates. Organizations will now need to either limit their implementation of Java SE or may need to drop it altogether. Slow Performance. Due to the all of the abstraction of the JVM, Java SE programs take much more resources to compile and run compared to Python. Poor UI appearance on all of the major GUI libraries (Swing, SWT, etc.). Through Android Studio, it is easy to get a native look/feel for Java apps, but when it comes to desktops, the UI is far from acceptable (does not mimic the native OS's look/feel at all). Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review The language is fluent and has good support from a number of open source and commercial IDEs. Language features are added every 6 months, although long-term service releases are only available every 3 years. It would be nice if some of the older APIs were depreciated with more pressure to move to the new replacement APIs (e.g. File vs. Path), but transitions to new features are generally well implemented.
Read full review Reliability and Availability The product has been reliable.
Read full review Performance 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.
Read full review Support Rating While support from Microsoft isn't necessarily always best of breed, you're also not paying the price for premium support that you would on other platforms. The strength of the stack is in the ecosystem that surrounds it. In contrast to other products, there are hundreds, even thousands of bloggers that post daily as well as vibrant user communities that surround the tool. I've had much better luck finding help with SQL Server related issues than I have with any other product, but that help doesn't always come directly from Microsoft.
Read full review Java is such a mature product at this point that there is little support from the vendor that is needed. Various sources on the internet, and especially StackOverflow, provide a wealth of knowledge and advice. Areas that may benefit from support is when dealing with complex multithreading issues and security libraries.
Read full review In-Person Training This training was more directed toward what the product was capable of rather than actual programming.
Read full review Online Training 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Chose to go with Java instead of Python or C++ due to the expertise on the ground with the technology, for its ease of integration with our heterogeneous setup of production servers, and for the third party library support which we've found was able to address some challenging aspects of our business problem.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review The different versions make it harder to work with other companies where some use newer versions while some use older versions, costing time to make them compatible. Licenses are getting to be costly, forcing us to consider OpenJDK as an alternative. New features take time to learn. When someone starts using them, everyone has to take time to learn. Read full review ScreenShots