| 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. |
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.