Microsoft BI (MSBI) vs. RabbitMQ

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 is highly recommended that if you have microservices architecture and if you want to solve 2 phase commit issue, you should use RabbitMQ for communication between microservices. It is a quick and reliable mode of communication between microservices. It is also helpful if you want to implement a job and worker mechanism. You can push the jobs into RabbitMQ and that will be sent to the consumer. It is highly reliable so you won't miss any jobs and you can also implement a retry of jobs with the dead letter queue feature. It will be also helpful in time-consuming API. You can put time-consuming items into a queue so they will be processed later and your API will be quick.

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

• What RabbitMQ does well is what it's advertised to do. It is good at providing lots of high volume, high availability queue. We've seen it handle upwards of 10 million messages in its queues, spread out over 200 queues before its publish/consume rates dipped. So yeah, it can definitely handle a lot of messages and a lot of queues. Depending on the size of the machine RabbitMQ is running on, I'm sure it can handle more.
• Decent number of plugins! Want a plugin that gives you an interface to view all the queues and see their publish/consume rates? Yes, there's one for that. Want a plugin to "shovel" messages from one queue to another in an emergency? Check. Want a plugin that does extra logging for all the messages received? Got you covered!
• Lots of configuration possibilities. We've tuned over 100 settings over the past year to get the performance and reliability just right. This could be a downside though--it's pretty confusing and some settings were hard to understand.

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

• It breaks communication if we don't acknowledge early. In some cases our work items are time consuming that will take a time and in that scenario we are getting errors that RabbitMQ broke the channel. It will be good if RabbitMQ provides two acknowledgements, one is for that it has been received at client side and second ack is client is completed the processing part.

Incentivized

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

RabbitMQ is very easy to configure for all supported languages (Python, Java, etc.). I have personally used it on Raspberry Pi devices via a Flask Python API as well as in Java applications. I was able to learn it quickly and now have full mastery of it. I highly recommend it for any IoT project.

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

I gave it a 10 but we do not have a support contract with any company for RabbitMQ so there is no official support in that regard. However, there is a community and questions asked on StackOverflow or any other major question and answer site will usually get a response.

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.

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 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

RabbitMQ has a few advantages over Azure Service Bus 1) RMQ handles substantially larger files - ASB tops out at 100MB, we use RabbitMQfor files over 200MB 2) RabbitMQ can be easily setup on prem - Azure Service Bus is cloud only 3) RabbitMQ exchanges are easier to configure over ASB subscriptions ASB has a few advantages too 1) Cloud based - just a few mouse clicks and you're up and running

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

• Positive: we don't need to keep way too many backend machines around to deal with bursts because RabbitMQ can absorb and buffer bursts long enough to let an understaffed set of backend services to catch up on processing. Hard to put a number to it but we probably save $5k a month having fewer machines around.
• Negative: we've got many angry customers due to queues suddenly disappearing and dropping our messages when we try to publish to them afterward. Ideally, RabbitMQ should warn the user when queues expire due to inactivity but it doesn't, and due to our own bugs we've lost a lot of customer data as a result.
• Positive: makes decoupling the web and API services from the deeper backend services easier by providing queues as an interface. This allowed us to split up our teams and have them develop independently of each other, speeding up software development.

Incentivized