Likelihood to Recommend Microsoft SQL Server is a great RDBMS and meets all of our requirements. If you need a stable DB platform to support your line of a business application you'll be well served. Licensing costs are far cheaper, more portable and a lot more user friendly than Oracle. Product support and security patches from Microsoft are strong.
Read full review If your data sets are coming in without much stewardship then
Tableau Prep can help to clean the data before you start trying to create visualizations for your end users. You will save a lot of time this way - rather than seeing problems once you are creating dashboards. If you don't have large data sets or your data is relatively simple, then
Tableau Prep may not be needed.
Read full review Pros Easy to configure and use with Visual Studio and Dot Net Easy integration with MSBI to perform data analysis Data Security Easy to understand and use Very easy to export database and tables in the form of SQL query or a script Read full review Display the raw data coming in from the data warehouse Point out situations that might be erroneous Show the distribution of raw data figures Read full review Cons The import/export process can be tricky to follow with lots of steps and could be better for importing flat files Obtaining help from Microsoft is cumbersome and often other internet sources are better and quicker The documentation is not great and again it's generally better to obtain help elsewhere if needed Read full review Use of Macros within Workflow (and more types of automation) Join Editor also giving a SQL Update Query More types of visuals Read full review Likelihood to Renew We understand that the Microsoft SQL Server will continue to advance, offering the same robust and reliable platform while adding new features that enable us, as a software center, to create a superior product. That provides excellent performance while reducing the hardware requirements and the total cost of ownership of our solution.
Read full review It is a valuable tool for generating and cleaning files for multiple purposes.
Read full review Usability SQL Server mostly 'just works' or generates error messages to help you sort out the trouble. You can usually count on the product to get the job done and keep an eye on your potential mistakes. Interaction with other Microsoft products makes operating as a Windows user pretty straight forward. Digging through the multitude of dialogs and wizards can be a pain, but the answer is usually there somewhere.
Read full review It works well and is user friendly for the basics but needs more options for bring in data (using SQL queries for example) and export format options.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Its does not have outages.
Read full review Performance SSAS data cubes may some time slow down your Excel reports.
Read full review Support Rating We managed to handle most of our problems by looking into Microsoft's official documentation that has everything explained and almost every function has an example that illustrates in detail how a particular functionality works. Just like PowerShell has the ability to show you an example of how some cmdlet works, that is the case also here, and in my opinion, it is a very good practice and I like it.
Read full review I have not really had to reach out for any kind of customer support for
Tableau Prep, so I can't really say. However, the support that
Tableau has given for their other products has been great, so I would assume it would be the same here. They are also constantly adding new features and providing software updates, and that is always a plus.
Read full review In-Person Training It was good
Read full review Online Training very hands on and detailed training
Read full review Implementation Rating Other than SQL taking quite a bit of time to actually install there are no problems with installation. Even on hardware that has good performance SQL can still take close to an hour to install a typical server with management and reporting services.
Read full review Live connections to cloud services (Google Sheets for example) and cloud hosted databases (cloud hosted SIS for example) for scheduled flows are not supported
Read full review Alternatives Considered [Microsoft] SQL Server has a much better community and professional support and is overall just a more reliable system with Microsoft behind it. I've used
MySQL in the past and SQL Server has just become more comfortable for me and is my go to RDBMS.
Read full review Before Prep, we had to do all the data joining and connecting in a
Tableau Workbook. Not only did this cause workbooks connected with live data to run frustratingly slowly, a new connection and set-up had to be established every time a new workbook as created, even if you were working with the same data. The extracts produced by Prep allow several workbooks to be working from the same data set-up without any additional work, saving time and stress.
Read full review Scalability SQL server does handle growing demands of a mid sized company.
Read full review Return on Investment Increased accuracy - We went from multiple users having different versions of an Excel spreadsheet to a single source of truth for our reporting. Increased Efficiency - We can now generate reports at any time from a single source rather than multiple users spending their time collating data and generating reports. Improved Security - Enterprise level security on a dedicated server rather than financial files on multiple laptop hard drives. Read full review Quicker data sets for online reports More efficient data cleaning Ad Hoc reports Costly if using data management to schedule data pull and cleaning (priced per viewer accounts not creator accounts) Read full review ScreenShots