Microsoft BI is a business intelligence product used for data analysis and generating reports on server-based data. It features unlimited data analysis capacity with its reporting engine, SQL Server Reporting Services alongside ETL, master data management, and data cleansing.
$9.99
per user/per month
Teradata Vantage
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Teradata Vantage is presented as a modern analytics cloud platform that unifies everything—data lakes, data warehouses, analytics, and new data sources and types. Supports hybrid multi-cloud environments and priced for flexibility, Vantage delivers unlimited intelligence to build the future of business.
Users can deploy Vantage on public clouds (such as AWS, Azure, and GCP), hybrid multi-cloud environments, on-premises with Teradata IntelliFlex, or on commodity hardware with VMware.
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.
TV is well suited for high speed, which is a great for large tables. The workload functionality is very good when in Viewpoint. The BAR functionality could use a little work. QueryGrid is very useful as well. The client handlers are still a work in progress, as I keep hearing that they continue to fail. There are also many restarts on the systems as well.
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.
Teradata is an excellent option but only for a massive amount of data warehousing or analysis. If your data is not that big then it could be a misfit for your company and cost you a lot. The cost associated is quite extensive as compared to some other alternative RDBMS systems available in the market.
Migration of data from Teradata to some other RDBMS systems is quite painful as the transition is not that smooth and you need to follow many steps and even if one of them fails. You need to start from the beginning almost.
Last but not least the UI is pretty outdated and needs a revamp. Though it is simple, it needs to be presented in a much better way and more advanced options need to bee presented on the front page itself.
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.
Teradata is a mature RDBMS system that expands its functionality towards the current cloud capabilities like object storage and flexible compute scale.
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.
It has helped our project to save time, effort and give accurate results in the quickest possible time. The diagnostics feature is also outstanding giving us a detailed report of the error which occurred, when it occurred and the likely cause and resolution of the same as well. The support of SQL is inherited which makes it easy to work on it because you don't need to learn any new language for this.
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.
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.
We have meetings at the beginning with the technical team to explain our requirements to them and they were really putting in a lot of effort to come up with a solution which will address all our needs. They implemented the software and also trained a few of our resources on the same too. We can get in touch with them now as well whenever we run into a roadblock but it's very less now.
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.
Teradata is way ahead of its competitor because of its unique features of ensuring data privacy and data never gets corrupted even in worst case scenario. In most cases, the data corruption is a major issue if left unused and it leads to important data being wiped off which in ideal case should be stored for 3 years
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.
