Microsoft BI (MSBI) vs. Teradata Vantage

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.

Teradata Vantage is well suited for large scale ETL pipelines like the ones we developed for anti money laundering risk matrices. It handles heavy joins, aggregations, and transformations on transactional data efficiently. We generate alert variables, adjust for inflation, and monitor establishments monthly with it, all integrated with Python and Control-M for a centralised automation across the company. For less appropriate, I would say that heavy resource demands might slow down experimentation for iterative work.

• 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

• ETL (Extract - Transfor - Load)
• NOS to send data from Teradata Vantage to S3 and from S3 to Teradata Vantage
• Teradata GeoSpacial feature
• Bulk reading and writing in huge tables
• MPP capacity already mature
• Temporal Capacity more mature that other solutions
• TASM

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• 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.

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.

Teradata is a mature RDBMS system that expands its functionality towards the current cloud capabilities like object storage and flexible compute scale.

Incentivized

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

Teradata Vantage allows us to create a scalable infrastructure to support our strategic initiatives. The dedicated compute power ensures reliable performance with isolated workloads and dedicated resources, optimizing workflows for faster, more efficient data transfers. The compute clusters support ETL processes and OSF’s developers and data science team with the flexibility to create self-service analytics, to spin up/down at any time, driving better performance and minimizing costs.

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.

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.

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

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

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

• Moving to Teradata in the Cloud-enabled a level of agility that previously didn't exist in the organization. It also enabled a level of analytic competency that was not achievable using other options on the aggressive timeline that was required. We didn't want to settle for reinventing a wheel when we had a super tuned performance capable beast readily available in Teradata. Teradata lets us focus on our business rather than spending money and effort trying to design software or database foundations features on an open source or lower performance platform.

Incentivized