[Anon_Admirer]

There seems to be a lot of shade here at Power BI. Forgetting Microsoft’s dominance in the market, I’ve much appreciated Microsoft’s approach to data visualization which is soft on the visuals, but gradually improving them and hard on the programming aspects, such as Power Query or “M” and Data Analysis Expressions (“DAX”). The former they have opened to anyone to create via Power BI visuals SDK.

The reason I say this is because something that would take me hours to do in Tableau maybe only take a few minutes with Power BI’s mashup language (Power Query) and the Functional Language DAX. The ability to create temporary tables on the fly and utilize variables and the hundreds of other things you can do with DAX to create complex measures, calculated columns, etc. feels empowering. Most people I’ve spoken to who’ve gone away from Tableau to Power BI and used it long enough start to really appreciate it for the vast capabilities.

Additionally, the latest Power BI visual calculations feature released has made the learning curve a lot shorter for those newer to DAX and all our lives much easier.

On the visuals side there has been a lot of entrepreneurship to create custom visuals with the SDK to do a lot of visuals that just weren’t available in Tableau. So many that I have a hard time going back to Tableau because its missing a visual I need.

Lastly, not many talk about the fact the IT loves it in that its got so many capabilities for providing data governance and security through its various features.

Update and one final thought: there is some genius to me in how Microsoft seemed to have created an abstraction that allows the platform to grow independently and greatly on so many fronts - DAX with new functions and features, the Power BI Visuals and their SDK to do more and keep in with user interface changes, and their BI model approach (which now allows GIT versioning with readability changes).

[wokwokwok]

Wow, you really love PoweBI huh.

I’ve done the microstrategy, powerbi, tableau dance for about 3 years and I wasn’t impressed.

It’s easy to do easy things and hard to do hard things.

The versioning is quite bad.

The powerBI gateways are complex to maintain, expensive and incomprehensible when they don’t work (update failed? Good luck! Out of quota? Times out? Haha…)

DAX is pretty; but when it’s big, it’s spaghetti. Worse than SQL.

The custom components are frustratingly difficult to get right because they have to be extremely flexible.

…but, sure; it is what it is.

The ecosystem is pretty good.

Lots of documentation on how to do trivial things.

It’s ok.

I would avoid it if I could though; there’s a deep well of suffering to anyone who has to look after the stuff that people “whip together quickly” in PowerBI.

So… I guess it’s fair to say opinions vary.

Maybe it’s better than the others?

…buuut, like it? Nah.

[Anon_Admirer]

> Wow, you really love PoweBI huh.

Wouldn’t say love but prefer over the alternatives. I still find the user interfaces could have been designed better if they were not so focused on matching like other office products. I wish it was as nice as it is to wireframe in Figma. The ribbon and other office elements are dated and not as conducive to todays standard where good collaboration tools is helpful to bringing developers and designers together while being efficient.

> The versioning is quite bad.

Agreed, but it’s got better over the years. Especially in the most recent release of Power BI projects. I feel that Microsoft’s strategy is to provide this new format and let independent developers create versioning tools while they take on higher priorities. They have often taken things those developers have created and incorporated them into their products. As with all the product requests, you got to pick your battles - I don’t defend which ones they choose. I’m just happy to finally have GIT versioning.

> DAX is pretty; but when it’s big, it’s spaghetti. Worse than SQL.

I agree 100%. I liked how Tableau had a more SQL feeling syntax. I luckily come from an Excel heavy background so adopting was easier than some. I find that most of the verbose code is due to dealing with row and filter contexts which in DAX can be frustrating. Debugging is difficult… I can go on. With that said, others have offering differing opinions (see: https://www.sqlbi.com/blog/alberto/2020/06/20/7-reasons-dax-...). All I can say is that I feel there is probably could have been a better syntax / functional language then the one created to produce the same functionality and maintain independence.

[dav43]

my biggest issue with Power BI after building washboarding for hospitals was that they are dangerous.

There are impossible to drill down and understand - "where did this data come from" - how was this calculated.

Similar to other comments, you can version, it's beyond hard to error check. A python or sql script you can at least verify and recreate. I view Power BI as just the new excel - big files full of hidden errors.

[prepend]

My biggest complaint with powerbi is that there’s no versioning and collaboration across multiple authors is really hard. I can’t put it in git other than a binary blob and so that means for anything serious I have to just hope nobody goes in and breaks stuff.

At least tableau project files are just xml so you can stick it in git and have ugly merge requests. And rollback to versions if necessary.

The fact that Microsoft doesn’t even see this is a problem is infuriating and makes it hard for any serious data work where you need reproducibility and auditability.

[Anon_Admirer]

Have a look into Power BI developer mode which works with GIT:

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/deep-dive-into-powe...

They recently released an update in preview that has a more human readable format:

https://powerbi.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/tmdl-in-power-bi-de...

For comparing semantic models there is ALM Toolkit: http://alm-toolkit.com/

You can also edit BI Models with Tabular Editor which can save objects to storage:

https://tabulareditor.com/downloads

And phi-tools for DevOps: https://pbi.tools/ I’d wait in pbi-tools to start working with Power Bi Developer Mode / Power BI Project files