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Comment by go_prodev | Hacker News Reader

Free: Power BI is probably going to give you everything you need. It's free, easy to use and provides a lot of features to grow into.

Paid: If you have the budget, Aqua Data Studio gives you the database management functionality AND all of the visualizations you'll find in Tableau in the 1 product.

(My company shifted from Tableau to Power BI. At first it seemed like a beta product with lower fidelity. But Microsoft has made the whole power suite into a force to be reckoned with... highly recommended)

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Power Bi has been very abusive of my systems, although this has lessened of late.

I can see hundreds of logins to my database per user, and when I cut the logins per userid to 5, their applications collapse. Their queries cannot be tuned to available indexes according to my users.

They remain the very first ones that I throw off a database if there is a performance problem, with some degree of prejudice.

I've always preferred to shunt such analytics work over to a query replica dedicated to the purpose so the people doing analytics can generally only interfere with each other.

Whether that's a viable answer in any given situation is of course highly variable, but even if the analytics queries are my own hand-rolled SQL it's still my preference any time it -is- viable if nothing else so I don't have to worry as much about screwing up and taking too many locks / using too few indices while I'm iterating on the query in question.

Your users may benefit from using import mode rather than direct query mode.

Under the covers Power BI is running a tabular Analysis Services Cube, so import mode will be optimized for reporting regardless of the source database indexing.

The PBI dataset can be shared across users, so only 1 connection is required to update it, instead of dozens of users hitting the db directly.

Also as another person mentioned, reporting is usually done on an separate database to production applications like an operational data store, data lake, or warehouse.

I used to like qlik more than pbi/tableau but they stopped making the personal desktop version free. Qlik’s scripting and “associative” engine is great.

We use PowerBI. Wouldn't recommend. I also don't believe it's free, but perhaps that's just the version we use.

I guess it comes down to what you are trying to accomplish.

The desktop version is free, no strings attached. However the value comes from publishing to the web service for sharing etc. That's not free. It can be cheap, but when you have a lot of users the "premium capacity" can be quite expensive.

PowerBI is not free to use, its part of Office 365 (Microsoft 365 or whatever it is called today). I remember 2 companies ago (in 2019) some data scientists had to get a license for it approved.

For personal analytics the desktop version is free. The web service has different pricing tiers (which can be very expensive)

Edit...just to add to this. I personally pay for it and it's $5/mth. Premium capacity can be a lot more...but if the Data Scientist needed a license, it may have only been $5/mth, paltry compared to a data scientist salary.

It was a non-profit, every single EUR had to be accounted for. On the good side, they did get heavy discounts on some licenses, including from Microsoft Windows/Office. Except IT manager didn't know (even though he was a Microsoft fanboy), he only figured that out after paying full price for years...

I'm curious why you don't recommend PowerBI. What are the pain points?

Thankfully my memory is cloudy :-) maybe two points:

1. In general the idea of a separate reporting DB maintained by separate people who might not understand the semantics of schema changes seems inefficient in a world of cheap compute, compared to an application exposing key metrics directly. Upgrading every two weeks with an ETL pipeline off an app can result in RTL breaking every two weeks. Better just to release metrics from the same team that makes any other changes.

2. I think connecting hosted PowerBI to a IP-whitelisted Azure blob store is not possible, and that just seemed silly.

*Free - just as in "beer".

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