What are /r/BusinessIntelligence's favorite Products & Services?

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The Data Warehouse Toolkit by Kimball was recommended to me as "The Source" for DW. I just started reading it, so no experience yet.

The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Definitive Guide to Dimensional Modeling, 3rd Edition https://www.amazon.com/dp/1118530802/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_LZ-7CbHQTXGRM

I can share my opinion here.

When developing dashboards for c-suite, I usually like to divide the content by logical area of focus (eg sales, marketing, operations, etc.) and then organize it by level of depth. These folks have short attention spans so it is all about less is more for page one/above the fold.

So, your first dashboard would be the topline KPIs v. Your most important comparison (presumably target) and a single trend line indicating it’s direction…in your case it might be 4wk MA or 13wk MA.

If there is a need to go deeper on trend, allow users to double click into it and land on a trend page for that metric. That way, they are not getting lost on all the ways you can see that data point if they don’t need to and you can have them laser focused on the handful of important metrics most of the time.

This book has been a go to resource for me over the years…might be worth a look if you are interested in learning more about the broader principals of designing high impact dashboards and reports.

Information Dashboard Design: Displaying Data for At-a-Glance Monitoring https://www.amazon.com/dp/1938377001/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_fabc_JNB6MHP20D46JCQWPZB4

Let me know if you have more specific questions here! Glad to help.

Source: I run an analytics department (VP) and on the side provide freelance support for these sorts of projects

I'm on the Metabase team and I wanted to share this with this subreddit. We've been working on a hosted version of Metabase for a while , and we're happy to formally pull back the covers.

Over the years we've tried to make self-hosting as easy as possible, but lots of companies have let us know they'd prefer a fully managed version of Metabase. So... here it is!

https://www.metabase.com/blog/Announcing-Metabase-Cloud/ has the official announcement, but if you have any questions, fire away =)

I’m one of the domain experts where I work so usually don’t need to interrogate too hard, but I am reading this excellent book on gathering requirements for BI projects.

Agile Data Warehouse Design

Agreed, check out the Magic Quadrant, but pop "Gartner Magic Quadrant 2021" into Bing ;) and download the full document from a vendor, here it is from Microsoft. Keep in mind that Microsoft paid A LOT of money to be able to give this to you, and that much of the Gartner analysis is based on "the overall effectiveness of the sales channel." They're words, not mine. Alas, the analysis is very good if you actually read it.

Not sure how you came up with your survey list, but my take on Power BI vs Tableau: Tableau has a great community that does incredible things with the tool, but the learning curve for real "self service" is rather high. Power BI is easier to use and much cheaper. Tableau started the viz game, Power BI carried the legacy on. Looker is well loved, but read about it to see if it's a good fit for your org.

All of the above doesn't matter at all if it's not a fit for your organization. How savvy are your users, admins, etc.? What features do you need? And so on... My company makes a product called FlexIt Analytics that's geared towards medium-sized organizations that want to stay close to their SQL and spreadsheets, but still get solid viz/dashboarding and enterprise BI (metadata, apis, security, etc.) features. Not for everyone, but perfect fit for some orgs.

We are using Jira from Atlassasin. It's a bit on the heavy side for handling service requests. On the other hand it's deployed corporate wide, so with development tasks one can link items dependent on each other. Before we used RT from Best Practical .

SAP Web Intelligence (Webi or Bobj for short), Microsoft Power BI, and IBM Cognos are the three big enterprise applications I'm aware of which knock off what you're describing.

SAP Bobj I have the most experience with. It's great - longer development time than Tableau, but it has more enterprise scale ready features like super customizable scheduled reporting, blending of databases from multiple different sources and types in a very easy to use format, and more. Simple Dashboards are easily created with Dashboard Designer or Lumara if you want to make them.

Bobj License cost will likely be a bit higher than Tableau but it'll do exactly what you need with as much growth room as you want. And there are some cloud options to make it easier - https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00CB2IV24

Tableau you could get to work. Based on your comment, however, with no dashboards needed or discovery required, it may be a bit of a round peg in a square hole. You can make it work great, but SAP Bobj or Cognos will do that out of the box.

Microsoft's Power BI I know less about at enterprise scale - hopefully someone else can chime in with experience there.

As a Student, chances are that your university has some kind of deal with Microsoft licensing - which means PowerBI should be available to you.

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/

Failing that, Excel is the old-school BI tool, and is still used heavily for prototyping purposes in conjunction with powerpoint for presentations.

The best BI implementation is the one that allows you to use as much time as possible on your datasets, not the software in itself. Unless a business requirement calls for it, use techniques and software you are already familiar with.

Instead of focusing too much on the technology part, think about which kind of data that interests you. Then the visualisations will come naturally to you when you have a subject you're interested in. Failing that, sports statistics are pretty easy to grasp, and thus implement.

Just remember that the intelligence part of BI very often consists of just analyzing changes over time, so keep in mind when you develop your dataset and reports. Having one stellar set of records for one time period is less interesting than having a smaller dataset over several.

>What’s next for AAS?

>As we make Power BI a superset of AAS, we understand it’s not always easy for existing AAS customers to transition to Power BI Premium. For example, Azure billing is preferred by some AAS customers. There are manual steps required for migration. The different licensing models and costs of AAS and Power BI Premium can make it difficult. We are working on a plan to address this and will share it in the coming months. Please stay tuned. I guarantee you won’t want to miss it!

Found some confirmation? Source

Are you looking to develop web-pages that your 5500+ users can get to that include dashboards/charts or are you looking to allow those 5500+ users to generate the charts?

If it's a simple matter of you making the charts and then deploying them out to your users then you may look into something like highcharts which is pretty simple to work with (http://www.highcharts.com/demo) (you feed it JSON data typically via an API and configure it via javascript). If you want to go with something completely free then I'd probably point you to some of the examples for d3js (https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery) which require a bit more work to use but are also great.

Going the opposite direction, a lot of BI vendors offer rapid development tools for building out dashboards/charts/reports as a web application/page. They'll cost you a bit of money but ultimately make up for themselves in terms of time savings (I happen to work for one of these vendors so I'll abstain from links).

Most companies including tableau have exams (associate / professional / partner levels).

Exams are ~$250 usd but the training costs <1k . You can find alternative training books online and people will often write blog posts about how they became certified using only open/free online resources.

Tldr: search "tableau associate free training blog" many people have asked and answered this same question. Best of luck

As a BA I'd expect them to be responsible for requirements gathering. To that end, I'd recommend this:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0956817203/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_fabc_31q3Fb1TT3YQZ

I'd second the idea of reading Kimball too. Maybe not the whole thing from a technique perspective, but certainly the first 2 chapters which are more high level.

Honestly though, I sometimes feel that data nerds are wired differently and you either get it, or you don't. I've worked with IT professionals and programmers who I'd consider far more gifted and qualified than I am, but data concepts really confuse them, whereas I've always picked it up without much effort.

I would suggest doing something like the Data Science Specialization through Coursera.

It won't make you a Data Scientist but it will help you to think about how to perform data analysis. It will help you remove yourself a bit from the data and to think of it holistically.

A great place for anyone to start would be the Gartner Magic Quadrant report. 2014 should be coming out soon, here's a link for 2013. There's a couple toolsets on here that could be added to your list.

http://www.zdnet.com/gartner-releases-2013-bi-magic-quadrant-7000011264/

I'm usually a big fan of the gitlab way of handling standard columns. They outline these as important for every table (reference here)

All facts and dimensions have the following audit columns:

• revision_number - this is a manually incremented number representing a logical change in the model
• created_by - this is a GitLab user id
• updated_by - this is a GitLab user id
• model_created_at timestamp - this is a static value for when the model was created
• model_updated_at timestamp - this is the last time the model was updated by someone
• dbt_created_at timestamp - this is populated by dbt when the table is created
• dbt_updated_at timestamp - this is the date the data was last loaded. For most models, this will be the same as dbt_created_at with the exception of incremental models.

Classic problem. Also you didn't say how many users there are. Here is the best solution, but it's not pretty.

https://www.devart.com/odbc/mysql/docs/excel.htm

I would then create a bunch of views in MySQL, if your table names are not easily understandable, to make it more business user friendly. Your MySQL server is going to get hit hard by all the queries, but its the best option.

The ideal solution would be to get all the finance guys in a room, figure out what data they need and provide it in one application in memory, but sounds like you aren't at a company with a good data culture.

Can definitely recommend checking out some review sites. One comment mentioned IT Central Station which is a great option, especially for the enterprise market. Our analytics software platform serves mostly SMBs looking to embed BI in their products, and customers have reported that both Capterra and G2Crowd were helpful resources when searching. Both these sites verify reviewers (some don’t – we’ve seen sham reviews of our product out there.) Good luck!

My company "strongly encouraged" me to watch all 16 hours of this beautiful mess. All in all, it was actually pretty informative, but I had some Crystal experience before so a lot of it (the first 4 hours or so) are really basic and a real drag.

I just don't think you should get too wrapped up in this or that database. At any decent place you'd work there should be DBA's who'll administer all that stuff. It's more important to just learn the fundamentals of SQL.

You can just look around for SQL tutorials, here's one that looks decent on first look http://sqlzoo.net/wiki/SQL_Tutorial

So many people ask this question. The solution for SQL is so simple: just start using it! I guarantee that in the space of 4 hours you will have a full page of SQL code that you created from nothing.

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Try this:

1. Request read-only access to a database
2. Install SSMS
3. Load up SSMS, connect to the database
4. Using the treelist on the left: drill down into a database -> table
5. Right-click the table -> New Query
6. Write SELECT * FROM tableName
7. Now, try to join it to another table

We ended up going with [MongoDB Connector for BI

](https://www.mongodb.com/products/bi-connector). It was the easiest solution once you get the connection configured. We are able to connect to MongoDB through a MySQL ODBC. Our goal was to get in in the warehouse but I was able to connect Tableau directly to it.

Yes it is possible by using the rest API See example here https://powerbi.microsoft.com/da-dk/blog/announcing-the-public-preview-of-power-bi-rest-api-support-for-dax-queries/

Requires Premium however.

Yes, but then it's just hitting the backend database. And snowflake is an awesome backend database for analytics. That's the value here.

It's what Redshift markets to be. It's not new, it's just a columnar database that's really good at what it does. Scales easily and doesn't need management overhead like others in the market do.

Plus it supports full ansi SQL, so need to know dax or mdx or another flavor.

I like ssas, but I'm fairly certain it's going to be rolled up into the power bi service rather than it's own offering sometime in the next year or two. Just like we saw ssrs roll into it over the past year. (link to the latest PBI news: https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-expands-self-service-prep-for-big-data-unifies-modern-and-enterprise-bi/)

Hi there-

Actually, I'm kind of looking into this sort of thing as well, and actually, it's probably a pretty common-type consideration in the BI business, if you take my meaning.

So, you'd obviously have to be careful and/or steer clear of NDA issues, and perhaps even further that just "anonymizing" it would be to work out arrangements with some parts of the client-work that could be presented as either a template or as referencable, etc. ...But, the other day happened to see this "Power BI" Partner Showcase. Maybe worth checking out?

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/partner-showcase/

Anyone interested in the above should read Designing Data-Intensive Applications: The Big Ideas Behind Reliable, Scalable, and Maintainable Systems by Martin Kleppman

Wish I could give you a solid answer, but just searching Amazon yielded this short (130 pages) book and another title by David Loshin, decent BI theorheticals guy.

All I can say is build relationships. Seek to understand why they resist any sort of BI platform.

As far a resource to point to, this is tool-agnostic, but the famous Stephen Fewe book is a great model to get ideas on how to construct visualizations. I mean, most BI tools can make things that look really similar. Not sure if you're coming from Qlikview or Qliksense...if it's View, than PBI will probably be easier for you to build things with.

Will your new team be building from an enterprise data model (maybe the DW/ETL team is under a different management structure there?)? If not, you'll probably want to hire a data engineer type at some point. If your two devs are purely front-end, slapping a bunch of complicated SQL queries in reports won't be scalable.

There might be an opportunity as well to combine data analytics with the auditor expertise that you already have, by using techniques from the data analytics subfield of process mining. How process mining can assist in auditing is briefly introduced in https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jan_Martijn_Van_der_Werf2/publication/224122373_Auditing_2.0_Using_Process_Mining_to_Support_Tomorrow's_Auditor/links/55cb364708aeb975674ac946.pdf

I would check out some of the data science and data analysis courses on sites like coursera. They also have university sponsored specializations you can complete. BI is kind of a buzzword lately and it's hard to know exactly how your company implements it, so I would try to meet with someone in the company and ask what technologies and methodologies they use. https://www.coursera.org/specializations

The only one I've heard of is DFD and to be honest it's more of a technical/BA term when writing/documenting tech specs for how systems interoperate and/or requirement gathering than BI or data warehousing. And I've only heard it because I was taught it at school 20 years ago, in my professional career the only time I've seen one used in anger was in a very large, outsourced project (ERP migration) where there were pages of tech specs to ensure the multiple contractors understood everything.

Data normalization, star schema, useful every day for a BI/anyone who works with data. Most orgs now know how important getting the data warehousing / quality right first is the key that unlocks the value of BI - so for your students being confident with avoiding 'garbage in, garbage out' will set them up well in work.

Project management/lifecycle/prince2/agile - also would be useful to understand as most BI / BA 'work' is defined projects with planning, execution, and delivery (and the stakeholder management that goes with that in a workplace). I often get my team to learn requirements gathering from a chapter in this book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Business-Analysis-Debra-Paul-dp-1780175108/dp/1780175108/ref=dp_ob_image_bk which covers it nicely (we have an older version but I'm sure the latest is still good).

Best of luck with the class.

Tableau is basically a coordinate system that you can manipulate pretty precisely to get lots of unique UI and visual features. People do crazy stuff once they get really good, but it also becomes a nutty soup of measures that in my opinion just create fancy but unmaintainable messes. Power BI is much more limited with visuals but has far superior local data manipulation so it always seemed better at getting things right and metrics are reusable.

If I had a had OPs use case I would go pbi for this reason. If you sell people things with data or have the budget to maintain something pretty but complicated then tableau shines.

I admit I’m out of the game recently but I’ve used both tools at different companies for years. Tableau is easier to start but is quickly complicated. Pbi is complicated at first but gets fast and reliable once you get the hang of Dax and Query editor.

Tableau example of coords: https://www.tableau.com/about/blog/2017/11/data-map-discovery-78603

Model Thinker does a good job of relating mathematical models to real life scenarios. The later chapters may help you fall asleep quicker https://www.amazon.com/Model-Thinker-What-Need-Know/dp/0465094627? Scorecasting is a light read too https://www.amazon.com/Scorecasting-Hidden-Influences-Behind-Sports/dp/0307591808?

https://www.tableau.com/solutions/gallery/analysis-beatles

Author: Adam McCann

Twitter: u/adamemccann

Website: www.DuelingData.com

Source: Song/Album data from Wikipedia

Lyrics data from beatlesnumber9.com

Adam makes incredible visualizations. He has been my favorite for a while.

Data Vault 2.0 Methodology has a whole section on Governance

https://www.ben-morris.com/data-vault-2-modelling-the-good-the-bad-and-the-downright-confusing/

Tableau Blueprint has a good collection of best practices from their clients.

https://www.tableau.com/learn/blueprint

The Kimball Data Warehouse Toolkit is probably the definitive answer, but Star Schema: The Complete Reference does a great job of distilling the concepts into a very readable (and shorter) book. https://www.amazon.com/Schema-Complete-Reference-Christopher-Adamson/dp/0071744320?ref_=d6k_applink_bb_dls&amp;dplnkId=4194aa11-94d8-4bfe-b4a3-6bbb471f4e9c

There is also Agile Data Warehouse Design which is written by ex-Kimball staff applying an Agile approach.

I recommend Kimball first, Corr’s book is very good around asking questions of subject matter experts, and so is well suited to consultants or people new to an industry or employer.

SQL skills are a good foundation. Read Kimball’s Dimensional Modelling book to develop the modelling skills.

You’ll need to find datasets and set up something like SQL Server.

For one take on the role that data plays, I'd recommend reading Astroball: https://www.amazon.com/Astroball-New-Way-Win-All/dp/0525576649

They talk about how they integrated human input and data effectively back when the Houston Astros went from near the bottom of the rankings to winning that season!

It really depends on the project but also on your own habits and those of the team.
If you like this subject as much as we do, check the article we wrote about, hope it will make you like it even more :)
https://zenkit.com/en/blog/agile-vs-waterfall/

Have you looked at the Business Analytics course? SQL and excel are valuable skills.

Otherwise I agree learning Power BI is a valuable skill.

Learn basic SQL and wait until you start for the rest. They hired you knowing your skill set so they’ll train you. Also, each SQL and DB installation is unique to a company. And it can also vary by cloud versus on prem. There’s an ANSI standard of SQL that most languages support the base but then things can get quite different. I wouldn’t bother installing or setting up a server. Instead find a Python library that lets you write SQL against data frames and practice that way.

https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/connect-python-with-sql/

You can often connect Python directly to the DB as well, or at least that’s how most infra I’ve worked on are set up.

What are some entry level roles?

I am currently building my resume and adding projects from my Business Analytics nanodegree. I'm looking at Business Intelligence, Data Analyst and adding Jr., Intern, etc to them. I've seen "ETL" in the comments and I think that's where I'd like to go. So I'm wondering if there are any other roles I could try to apply for.

If needed: I'm almost done with my nanodegree (tableau, SQL, excel) and learning python on my own. I'm about 2 years into my BSBM. I wish my school had a finance minor, but I may pick up a certificate or something later on. I'm thinking about FreeCodeCamp's data track https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/building-a-data-science-curriculum-with-advanced-math-and-machine-learning/ for later.

ASUS ZenBook 14 (2020) Intel Core i7-1165G7 11th Gen 14 inches FHD Business Laptop (16GB/512GB SSD/Office 2019/Windows 10 Home/Iris Xe Graphics/Pine Grey/1.17 kg), UX425EA-KI701TS https://www.amazon.in/dp/B0983W8HR4/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glt_i_FNF2FVN6JR4DNNY94Z3Z

Will be smooth, light weight and long lasting

If you set up an Amazon affiliate account, you can use their API to pull product data (name, price, ratings, text info etc.) I believe you can make around 1 request per second if you don't sell anything. But that would still be 86,400 rows per day.

Or check out the AWS public datasets. Some have billions of records:

https://aws.amazon.com/public-data-sets/

maybe dash/plot.ly?

https://plot.ly/dash/open-source/

Though (unlike typical BI tool) it requires quite heavy Python and data is not compressed.

There is a great training on Udemy for this tool.

With traditional BI tools there always a pricing/licensing problem (embedded or non-embedded analytics) when you need to share something with wide user base, especially outside of your company.

I think your focus should be more on communication rather than the technical components. I'll assume that you can sufficiently get your way around SQL and Power BI to do basic bar and line charts as well as headline metrics.

The most important part is to gain clarity on KPIs, what they want to measure, frequency, and goals. Most KPIs should be dead simple to understand. The hard part is to get your departments to agree on it.

Then the next part is getting the data and preparing it for your dashboards. Come up with a standard format across departments wherever possible. You'll drive yourself crazy by managing a different data set per department, especially once executives say they want to see all the metrics on the same dashboard or in a cross-tab.

Along the way you should try to understand as much as possible what drives the business. If you have a hard time distilling it follow the money (what get's people paid and what affects their bonuses), you'll be surprised how little customer satisfaction is a key metric if departments aren't being paid for a positive result.

Finally check this KPI Index from GitLab - https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/business-ops/data-team/kpi-index/ . They are by far the most mature and transparent representation of KPIs I have ever seen, if every company would aspire to this model there would be much better run companies.

Not really sure if this is the place to post it but imma do it until someone tells me other wise.

I had a pretty good idea for an app tbh. Wont go into specifics for obvious reasons. I went with brainyapps bc it was the first source i found, have not paid anything, only had a phone call from the “senior consultant” Bruce. He was very nice, understanding and everything you’d expect from a salesman. (Im not an idiot, i know they are trying to sell me.) But i dont know if its worth it?

Is it a scam? I read 2 bad reviews and thats all i really need . 1 says its a scam and that they use overseas labor and the other is that they were very difficult to work with and have them understand. These are coming from people who paid.

Will link it right here: https://www.trustpilot.com/review/brainyapps.com read 1 star and 3 star reviews.

I had a phone interview with bruce and he was giving me all these numbers, it sounded made up. “8 billion phones are in use today!” “According to a recent study, the app industry is marked to go up to $37 trillion industry” “According to the university of Alabama...” blah blah blah. Sounded made up but I didn’t fact check him bc i didnt write anything down as i wasn’t in the best place (i was about to cut my hair).

I’m a 19 year old college student. I dont have the resources nor assets to come up with the $30,000 that “Bruce” is saying I’ll probably end up paying for the total app creation and marketing. So what im wondering now is:

1. Is it easy to make an app?

2. Is it cheaper to contract people myself?

3. Should i trust these “experts”.

4. What are my other options.

5. Is this the right subreddit? Lol

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

The product is still in nascent stages. Seems to be a whole lot of upfront configuration needed to define all these metrics, I feel like it necessitates a lot of work on the part of analysts / analytics engineers in order to make it work. Also there isn't much documentation on their site, so that's a little unsettling. See https://www.loom.com/share/a02ca622961f45ccb8f8ccd9fb27d5de for a demo.

From the outside looking in, we're not sure if it's going to pay off for a medium-sized company like ours where business users aren't really expected to self-serve that much. For now we're not committed to anything yet because we're not convinced.

You can compare both here: https://www.getapp.com/business-intelligence-analytics-software/a/qlikview-9/compare/tableau-software/

Have you looked at Apache Superset yet? I've only given it a quick look, but it might have some of the features you need, with both the ability to build dashboards and do some interactive analysis. It seems to be a little rough around the edges still, being an apache incubator project, but I find it interesting.

https://superset.incubator.apache.org/

What do you guys think about Superset. It’s open source (initially made by AirBnB) and looks super slick.

Together with Presto on top of Cassandra or an efficient Postgres this should be a nice (cheap) alternative to any proprietary stack.

But that’s on paper. CMV :-)

https://superset.incubator.apache.org

https://prestodb.github.io

it can be used on prem.

it does run on linux.

it appears that whitelabeling is possible but on the payed enterprise edition.

You basically just need a simple querying / BI tool on top of your data.

Zing Data is free and works on your phone to let you ask business questions and share them with your colleagues. And visualize data with charts / graphs.

Metabase is another solid free option.

Looker is pretty pricey. For a data viz layer:

- Zing Data is free and slick on mobile,

- Metabase is good on desktop and has a free version.

I would definitively encourage you to check Metabase Embedding (which I think is already on your shortlist) then. However, if row-level permission and white-label are hard requirements you would have to check their Enterprise Embedded Analtyics.

That's cool you were looking into doing this, OP. I'm actually on the Metabase team, and I thought I'd throw it out there that we just announced today that we're offering a paid, fully hosted version now for folks who don't want to set Metabase up and maintain it on a server themselves. You can check it out on our blog: https://www.metabase.com/blog/Announcing-Metabase-Cloud/index.html

I know this is 3 months later, but I'm on the Metabase team and just thought I'd mention that we actually announced a hosted version of Metabase today: https://www.metabase.com/blog/Announcing-Metabase-Cloud/index.html

Try http://sqlzoo.net/ for SQL and https://www.codecademy.com/ for other languages like Python.

Honestly, don't underestimate the importance of being able to learn something on your own. You can learn things in an academic setting but on the job you may not have this luxury when something new comes up.

Tableau is good for this, especially if you want to spend your coding time on the data, not the presentation layer (HTML, JavaScript).

If you are an R user (or r willing to learn), this could be a good candidate: http://shiny.rstudio.com/

If you can host a web page somewhere, and have JQuery & JSON expertise, look into Highchart. There are many chart types and gauges. License are practically free.

http://www.highcharts.com/demo/dynamic-master-detail

Definitely need more info here:
How much data do you have? I'm assuming since Google Sheets, it's not a lot.
What's your budget? If you're a 1-10 person shop looking to share some charts, that's going to be a drastically different answer than a 1000+ person company with $10's of thousands to budget. Many BI Tools charge based on seats (i.e. license count) and user type, such as content creator, admin, view-only, etc.
What's your technical competency? If you're comfortable with Linux, you can run open source Redash for free on your own EC2 server: https://redash.io/ Seems a bit more limited compared to the bigger players but has a pretty low barrier to entry.

I've support both Tableau & Looker as a data warehouse engineer, and they can both be very powerful in the hands of BI folks that know what they're doing with the tool. PowerBI had been the tool that people had access to and could create quick visualizations since we already had licenses for it, because we were a Microsoft shop.

I work as a BI consultant and my company has been working a lot with Jaspersoft recently to build simple reports and dashboard like what you're looking for. Jaspersoft is a open-source BI platform and fairly simple to use. We've been running it with a AWS EC2 instance.

https://www.jaspersoft.com/
https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00B527JQ0

We also have experience with HIPAA secure data so PM me if you need help with this project.

Pick up any book and first learn the high level concepts. Books are great at giving you information at various levels of abstraction (big picture versus details).

Then look to sites like HackerRank or OpenHatch that post challenges. Go to the /r/sqlserver and /r/oracle subs to see if you can solve the problems that other people have.

The best way to learn comes from experience. I got lucky and learned under fire on the job. But it wasn't until I got to another organization that actually employed people that truly groked design principles and wanted to teach me these things that I really started to understand everything I had been doing for years.

Ahh yeah. Sorry. If you want free everything, then you'd probabily have to build a html page or sharepoint (if you have it) and use https://d3js.org/ to display your data.

All BI tools exist to make money, so I'm not sure you'll get everything for free.

We're using SSAS tabular and PowerBI/Excel. Works pretty well. If you have more technical skill and/or your dev hours are less valuable than paying for PowerBI maybe this is an option for presentation: https://d3js.org/

As far as I know you can do pretty much anything with it although I have no first hand experience.

Lots of folks are using Slack (https://slack.com) for team communication and integration with external services. I think too often BI systems are centered around the model of a single user interacting with some visual digital artifact. But, as Slack shows, there is power in facilitating group collaboration and communication in the context of data and visualizations.

With Slack's API (https://api.slack.com) its easy to plugin in with external services. What if anything are the major BI vendors doing in this area?

Well you are in luck, Newton just relaunched and it is one of the best email clients you can find, especially if you access email over multiple devices.

https://newtonhq.com/

You can give it a free try, nothing to lose, might gain something. It is quite expensive though but if you are a heavy mail user it worth the money.

PowerBI Report Server is available to organizations with PowerBI Premium subscription. And it allows you embed PowerBI reports onto your web application. The website doesn't say if you can purchase it standalone.

Or you can just fetch SSRS reports from your existing report server. There's no requirement for your customer to have an active directory account. Your web application would be the only thing that needs to have access to a service account with credentials on the reports server. And the licensing for that is covered by your SQL Server license.

I spent 5 years using Tableau and was apprehensive about moving to a new job at a Power BI shop. Honestly, I have been pleasantly surprised by Power BI, especially for building dashboards. We use kusto as our data platform and Power BI works well with that but kusto was a struggle with Tableau. I sometimes miss Tableau when it comes to data exploration but I have other tools for that. Should also say that Gartner agrees: "Microsoft named a Leader in the 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI Platforms | Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI" https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-named-a-leader-in-2021-gartner-magic-quadrant-for-analytics-and-bi-platforms/#:~:text=Today%20we're%20announcing%20that,Analytics%20and%20Business%20Intelligence%20Platforms.&amp;text=Microsoft%20....

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-named-a-leader-in-2021-gartner-magic-quadrant-for-analytics-and-bi-platforms/

You can write the output of a mapping to a mssql, MySQL database or any other flavor DB and read the data from there through an ODBC or native connector maybe? You can change this in the session settings within the workflow manager. Maybe your IT team needs to create a connection between the database and PowerCenter (it’s an abstraction layer).

Power BI can read from allot of sources : https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-bi-desktop-expanding-list-of-enterprise-data-connectors/

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/report-server/

I wouldn’t say dying entirely. SSRS still has Paginated reporting. Until Power BI can do that, it’s still not a direct replacement.

My team had had PBI up for about 3 years and is now in charge of replacing SSRS with PBIRS right now and it’s been mostly the same with a black and yellow color scheme.

Pretty shocked to see that no one has mentioned PBI-RS, specifically the paginated reports within there.

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/report-server/

Power Bi is essentially the next step of SSAS, PBI-RS Paginated Reportings is the next step of SSRS. They both serve a very important role in organizations.

The rule of thumb is pretty simple - if they need to explore the data make an interactive Power Bi dashboard, if they just need to see the numbers set up a Paginated report. There is a concerning amount of analysts out there trying to force Power Bi to be an SSRS solution, Power Bi is NOT built for that.

To actually answer your question - both, PBI & PBI-RS have significant overlap.

Let me know if you have any additional questions!

Not saying you have to use them, but the Power BI site has a ton of examples in the Data stories gallery and showcase. Including retail. I use them all the time for inspiration and they are FREE to view and interact with.

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/partner-showcase/

https://community.powerbi.com/t5/Data-Stories-Gallery/bd-p/DataStoriesGallery

Absolutely!

Nope. No premium (and we still don’t have premium. It doesn’t make sense for my org size).

You have a few options, the two we went with are:

1) power BI pro. This is one $10 license per use per month (60 day free trial). PRO users only need the license to view report on the web via browser, iPad, iPhone, etc.

2) power bi report server. This is basically a new platform built on SSRS that allows you to deploy BOTH power bi visual reports AND SSRS paginated reports to the same portal. Licensing is “unlimited” here because all you need is an AD account. PBI RS comes free with sql server enterprise as long as you get software assurance, and it’s also free to develop on with the Power BI Report Server Developer edition package.

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/report-server/

Developer edition: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/report-server/install-report-server

We use both and it’s been awesome. A limited number of users get pro, but everyone in our org can view the reports from their PC.

TECHNICALLY, you could get away with doing it for free as long as everyone has Power BI desktop and SharePoint, but this would void any guarantee of data security and integrity as everyone would also be able to edit reports.

Udemy is commonly considered to be a scam. This is due to its convoluted partner payment model, it's frequent and unlicensed use of copyrighted materials, and the questionable level of quality in many of their "courses".

Now from an end user perspective, it offers a wide variety of topics at reasonable rates - which many people regard as worth it. Combined with their partner payment model, and the misuse of copyrighted materials should give any user cause to pause and consider the legitimacy and nature of the content.

This makes it an ethical issue that each person should investigate and consider for themselves.

All that said, Microsoft has their own library of fantastic videos and walkthroughs taking you from 0 to Hero in Power BI and associated technologies, all free of cost. I've found this resource very helpful for report consumers and creators alike. This is specific to the use of the Power BI toolset and workflows. I highly recommend the "Guided Learning" section for videos and common task walkthroughs.

Microsoft Power BI - Learning Resources

A 16GB VM works fine for a start (you could adjust afterwards) .

SQL Server Developer Edition as its fully featured.

See below for Power BI license comparisons depending on the direction your organization wishes to take ;which may affect your choice of SQL as per ExPorkie15's comments

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/#powerbi-comparison-table

I had the same problem before. We want to install PowerBI considering it is more compatible with Microsoft products. But then one of my clients strongly recommended FineReport to us, we tried it out and found that it to be more powerful in reporting and dashboard, especially in designing complex reports and data display, pagination preview and export is perfect.

Maybe you can compare PowerBI and FineReport to see which product offers better functionalities for your needs?

The data size limit is based on your Power BI model, not the source data being brought in. There is a significant amount of compression that takes place when the data gets imported into Power BI. I think some of it depends on how your data is organized (number of columns, number of unique members in each of those columns, etc).

From my experience, the data is compressed at least 15x. I built a data model with source files ~900MB, and the Power BI file is ~50MB. For another data source totalling ~60MB, the Power BI file is 4MB.

If you are connecting directly to a server, the size of your data model depends on how much data you import via your Power BI query.

I believe this limit is per user, as well.

Needless to say, I haven't come close to worrying about data size.

more details here https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing

Maybe have a look at this slide deck: https://www.slideshare.net/CathrineWilhelmsen/biml-for-beginners-speed-up-your-ssis-development-malta-microsoft-data-platform-user-group?ref=https://www.cathrinewilhelmsen.net/biml/

I have not used MDX or multidimensional cubes. All SSAS models I develop are DAX or Tabular and PBI models are all tabular. Tabular models have taken over from multidimensional for the past ~5 years.

It appears that Tableau do not support connection to a tabular AS/PBI models so attempt to generate MDX queries for DAX models. That would have a performance impact for sure

I'd definitely recommend taking a bit of deep dive into Alteryx. As you said in an earlier post, you're not looking to directly compete, but there's definitely a benefit to seeing their features, how the software works.

Getting a trial version has been difficult for me in the past - usually had to jump through hoops with assurances that you'll be looking to purchase licenses. I don't know if that has changed more recently.

It may be also worth looking at Tableau Prep. I never actually used it while I was working with Tableau; it was released just as I moved to be more focussed on Power BI. However the team I was working in were curious over whether it would be a viable alternative to Alteryx.

https://www.tableau.com/learn/training/elearning?utm_campaign=Nurture-ELRN-ALL-ALL-ALL-ALL&amp;utm_medium=Social&amp;utm_source=LinkedIn&amp;utm_campaign_id=2017007

This is what Tableau themselves write about Reader: "... product limitations make Tableau Reader an appropriate option for some proof of concept projects but the wrong choice for deploying analytics at scale across your organization." https://www.tableau.com/products/viewer-vs-reader

Can you tell me more about what tableau has given to your company for paying 20k dollars? and is it embedded analytics plan that you are talking about, or you buy another license that allows you to embed the dashboards?

In this instance, doesn't it come down to the alias you've assigned to those fields? I feel like cleaning up the data could help you get around some of this frustration, in regards to Tableau's Ask Data anyway.

I'm sure you've already seen this, but give this a quick look-over:

https://www.tableau.com/learn/whitepapers/preparing-data-nlp-in-ask-data

To be honest, PowerBI, Tableau or any other tool are just a means to end. I would worry less about the tool that you want to use. Because you do not know what stack (tools) your future employer uses I would focus more on how to leverage a dashboard . A dashboard is all about telling a story. One book that is worth reading is: Storytelling with Data written by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic. She gives a nice perspective on things with lots of examples.

That said, i do believe that you can run tableau server on linux from what i can read here https://www.tableau.com/products/linux and go on from there.

Oh boy, you are in trouble.

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I would recommend Tableau videos: https://www.tableau.com/learn/training

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and make sure that your boss understands BI had two sides - DATA and VISUALIZATIONS. Both hard, data bit harder ;-)

Can you please clarify, if following the official tableau training videos will be sufficient. link - Getting Started

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Or if there's any comprehensive tutorial (preferably free) that I should follow to clear the exam. I'm actually looking for a list of videos which I'll follow end-to-end to learn and prepare for the exam. I'm new to Tableau and a beginner level certification is what I'm aiming for which is Tableau Desktop Specialist. I'm kind of confused as to which resources to follow, a lot of people, who have cleared the exam, are saying the exam is not difficult, but most of them have a working experience on it. I'm worried as I don't have the working exp. not sure how much time it will take to prepare and clear. Any help/suggestion will be quite useful for me in the process.

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Thank you.

Perhaps they just changed the price, but the Tableau website lists Viewer at $12/user/mo (billed annually with a min of 100 users, as you state) for on-prem and Public cloud. It's $15/user/mo for "Tableau hosted" deployments.

https://www.tableau.com/pricing/teams-orgs

Depending on how real time you want it, my approach would be to ETL the Jira data to a SQL DB with versioning and let it be consumed across the org from there. It seems there are plenty of Jira flows in PowerAutomate

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08BT9DZQW/

That one. It's $319 right now. I bought mine about a year ago. They seem to go on sale though. I don't game, or do anything really graphic intensive, so they work fine for me.

Have you read Star Schema: A Complete Reference?

His book and Ralph Kimball's work are really considered the definitive authority on dimensional modeling.

As for math skills, I used to have a rough time with math in high school. But analytics/data science is a lot of hands-on practice more than anything. It’s like how the only way to become a published writer is to write A LOT.

I’d definitely recommend a book called “A Mind for Numbers”. It really changed my outlook on learning and even how I approach needed analytics skills. It’s also a highly rated part of a Udemy course: https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Numbers-Science-Flunked-Algebra/dp/039916524X/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?adgrpid=57601891578&amp;dchild=1&amp;gclid=EAIaIQobChMI5ZWzg7Td7wIVGL3ICh2YKwgWEAAYASAAEgLMePD_BwE&amp;hvadid=410036122049&amp;hvdev=m&amp;hvlocphy=9012102&am...

I would look up some of the best practices around dashboard life cycles.

This is a resource from Tableau but it follows principles that I have learned at several BI jobs.

Basically see development of a dashboard in steps that need to be completed before moving on to the next step.

My personal approach looks something like

1. Requirements gathering
2. Front end mock up
3. Data model design
4. Dashboard implementation
5. UAT
6. Deploy and get feedback
7. Go back to 2

I'm sure many people have many different approaches but that's the one I find I like the most.

If you're looking for more of a guide on how to manage individual tasks or day to day work, I'd look into resources on scrum management. This book comes highly recommended, though I haven't read it myself, as I am more of a technical lead than a PM.

Switch true is just a fancy way to write nested if statements. If you just want "What is the difference in date between these values?" then you can just use datediff.

Dax and m are both based on functions. Functions have zero or more parameters and return a value. Braces [ ] usually represent an array of data or in Dax, they represent a column of data. Ex [1,2,3,4] Brackets { } usually represent key:value objects ex: {“value”: 1, “something else”: 2}.

M is a very different from Dax. It’s important to note that after the power query stage, data is stored in memory in a columnar format. So column ‘a’ is a vector of data in the format of that column (integer, float, w/e). This is a very efficient storage method to run fast real time calculations and Dax operates on the data in this columnar way. This requires you to think about it differently than querying a sql database or writing formulas in excel. Measures will also be effected by contractual filters. If you throw data into a table, the engine is basically filtering the data by each category in your table and then applying the measure logic.

M on the other hand, does not work like this. It is a row by row way of applying changes and functions to the data. It’s much slower, but more similar to sql.

This book has a lot of simple concepts and patterns: https://www.amazon.com/Power-Pivot-BI-Excel-2010-2016/dp/1615470395/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?dchild=1&amp;keywords=power+pivot+rob+collie&amp;qid=1615398200&amp;sprefix=power+pivot+rob+coll&amp;sr=8-1

More info: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dax/dax-syntax-reference

Big Data and the Computable Society: Algorithms and People in the Digital World I heard is pretty good! <strong>https://www.amazon.com/Big-Data-Computable-Society-Algorithms/dp/1786347067/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&amp;qid=&amp;sr=</strong>

I was recommended this book, I haven't read it but I will.. sharing in case anyone has read it to get some insights.

https://www.amazon.com/Enterprise-Big-Data-Lake-Delivering/dp/1491931558/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&amp;keywords=building+data+lake&amp;qid=1609101186&amp;s=books&amp;sr=1-2

not a 2020 book but I read it in 2020

https://www.amazon.com/Designing-Data-Intensive-Applications-Reliable-Maintainable/dp/1449373321

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opened my mind about going beyond data warehouses.

The latter part, seriously, first thing that came to mind!

I guess for analyst roles they may have tested general quant apti, data interpretation and coding rather than stats concepts.

OP is dope tho, or perhaps work environment in India is much more hostile. I can't imagine anyone in India asking about on reddit to seek help for a colleague!

Anyways, OP why don't you ask your colleague to try The Art of Statistics .

I haven't gone through it completely but I think it's pretty useful to the extent I am aware of.