Microsoft BI (MSBI) vs. SQL Server Integration Services

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.

Ideal for daily standard ETL use cases whether the data is sourced from / transferred to the native connectors (like SQL Server) or FTP. Best if the company uses MS suite of tools. There are better options in the market for chaining tasks where you want a custom flow of executions depending on the outcome of each process or if you want advanced functionality like API connections, etc.

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

• Ease of use - can be used with no prior experience in a relatively short amount of time.
• Flexibility - provides multiple means of accomplishing tasks to be able to support virtually any scenario.
• Performance - performs well with default configurations but allows the user to choose a multitude of options that can enhance performance.
• Resilient - supports the configuration of error handling to prevent and identify breakages.
• Complete suite of configurable tools.

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

• SSIS has been a bit neglected by Microsoft and new features are slow in coming.
• When importing data from flat files and Excel workbooks, changes in the data structure will cause the extracts to fail. Workarounds do exist but are not easily implemented. If your source data structure does not change or rarely changes, this negative is relatively insignificant.
• While add-on third-party SSIS tools exist, there are only a small number of vendors actively supporting SSIS and license fees for production server use can be significant especially in highly-scaled environments.

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.

Some features should be revised or improved, some tools (using it with Visual Studio) of the toolbox should be less schematic and somewhat more flexible. Using for example, the CSV data import is still very old-fashioned and if the data format changes it requires a bit of manual labor to accept the new data structure

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

SQL Server Integration Services is a relatively nice tool but is simply not the ETL for a global, large-scale organization. With developing requirements such as NoSQL data, cloud-based tools, and extraordinarily large databases, SSIS is no longer our tool of choice.

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.

Raw performance is great. At times, depending on the machine you are using for development, the IDE can have issues. Deploying projects is very easy and the tool set they give you to monitor jobs out of the box is decent. If you do very much with it you will have to write into your projects performance tracking though.

Incentivized

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.

The support, when necessary, is excellent. But beyond that, it is very rarely necessary because the user community is so large, vibrant and knowledgable, a simple Google query or forum question can answer almost everything you want to know. You can also get prewritten script tasks with a variety of functionality that saves a lot of time.

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.

The implementation may be different in each case, it is important to properly analyze all the existing infrastructure to understand the kind of work needed, the type of software used and the compatibility between these, the features that you want to exploit, to understand what is possible and which ones require integration with third-party tools

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

I had nothing to do with the choice or install. I assume it was made because it's easy to integrate with our SQL Server environment and free. I'm not sure of any other enterprise level solution that would solve this problem, but I would likely have approached it with traditional scripting. Comparably free, but my own familiarity with trad scripts would be my final deciding factor. Perhaps with some further training on SSIS I would have a different answer.

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

• Data integrity across various products allows unify certain processes inside the organization and save funds by reducing human labour factor.
• Automated data unification allows us plan our inputs better and reduce over-warehousing by overbuying
• The employee number, responsible for data management was reduced from 4 to 1 person

Incentivized