Power BI

[Whorty]

Anyone got any experience of implementing it? I've designed, built etc Cognos BI solutions, TM1, Business Objects, Essbase ... but never Power BI. Seems to be the current band wagon to jump on as it's 'easy' to roll out, but wondering if any real world experience.

Surely you still have to do all the same data analysis or source systems, all the same stuff you would do whether it was a SQL target DB or the Power BI DB?

[BigDataPro]

PowerBI or Tableau are just kids play. Download desktop version, play with some publicly available datasets. Pluralsight is offering a free weekend access. Try it to watch some video courses. I'll post free weekend link for those interested.

[ladymuck]

Connect it to a dB, pull some data down and then manipulate it using either the built-in query language or R or some such.

You can do some of the manipulation as part of your SQL query to format the data into a sensible table, then you use the query editor to do further manipulations and then on the presentation side you can create further data manipulations and measures to get the pretty pictures working.

When PBI first turned up, pretty much everything was free. Now MS have locked a lot of the useful functionality down in various licensing rules so you can only do basic manipulation and dashboard sharing before getting your wallet emptied.