Our first cloud Data Warehouse
February 16, 2018
Our first cloud Data Warehouse
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Birst
[It's] Currently used by the sales org. We will expand this to finance, marketing and product management in the future.
Pros
- One stop shop for ETL | Data model | Visualization. No need to learn a new tool for each layer of the end to end BI process or find resources to manage layers.
- A perfect fit for a company of our size both in terms of head count and revenue.
- The library of functions that allow you to digress from the star schema is very useful. For every 5 reports we create, at least one of them will conflict with the dimensional model in place. These functions come in very handy in those situations.
Cons
- Advanced reporting is done using a feature called 'designer'. This is a reporting environment with a user experience that is stuck in the 90s. Its unfortunate that a modern BI tool that goes against the likes of looker and tableau has not put any effort to consolidate report creation into one env.
- Visualizations are very limited. We are able to answer most of the questions using a table, pie, bar or line charts. But a specific use case that shows customer share of wallet would have been a great fit for Gantt chart but not supported in birst.
- The things you can do to fancy up charts and tables are also very limited. For example, you cannot selectively display values for the line graph but turn it for the bars in the same chart. Conditional formatting is also very limited in nature.
- Performance can be very slow sometimes. We don't have a large volume of data - considering that, the reports don't render fast enough.
- The platform has more features set in ETL/data Model areas than in visualization.
Birst allows direct access to an internal data store, which none of the products we evaluated provided. We also found the birst ETL layer far more powerful than the other platforms we considered.
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