Today is the 12th anniversary of the first post on this blog, and as in previous years I’m going to use this as an opportunity to sum up my thoughts over what’s been going on in my corner of the Microsoft BI world in the last twelve months.
Power BI
I think it’s fair to say that 2016 was the year that Power BI became the big commercial success that many of us hoped it would be. After the achingly slow uptake of Power Pivot and the failure of the original Office 365 Power BI it’s great to see Microsoft BI with a hit on its hands. Many of my existing customers have started using it alongside the rest of the SQL Server BI stack, especially SSAS, because it’s much easier to build reports and share them via the browser or mobile devices than with SSRS or Excel. I’ve also started working with new type of customer, one that I’ve never worked with before: small and medium organisations (including many not-for-profits) who have Office 365 but no existing BI solution, the kind of organisation that does not have the money or resources for a SQL Server BI solution or indeed any other kind of traditional BI solution. This, I believe, is where the real opportunity for Power BI lies and where the majority of the new growth will come from.
Apart from my own customers, there’s plenty of other evidence for the success of Power BI. The energy of the Power BI community, on forums and at user groups, is amazing – and once again, the people that I meet at user groups are completely different to the crowd you get at a normal SQL Server user group. The analysts love it too: for example, Microsoft is now in the Leaders section of the Gartner Magic Quadrant. There’s also the fact that competitors like Tableau have started attacking Power BI in their marketing, so I guess they must consider it a major threat.
Why has it been such a success? The underlying technology is great, but then again the technology was always great. The pace of change is incredible and it’s good to see Microsoft throwing its vast resources behind a product with some potential, rather than another Zune or Windows phone. There’s still some catching up to do but at this rate any existing gaps will have been closed by the end of 2017. The willingness to listen to customer feedback and act on it is refreshing. The Excel/Power Query/Power Pivot and SSAS crossover adds a angle that the competition doesn’t have. Finally, the licensing is almost perfect: it’s simple (compared to the usual thousands of SKUs that Microsoft usually comes up with) and cheap/free, although organisations with thousands of users who all need Pro subscriptions find the costs escalate rapidly; I’d like to see special deals for large numbers of users, and some recognition that many users who need to see Pro-level reports don’t need to create reports using these features. I know Microsoft has already heard this from a lot of people, though, and has taken it on board.
Probably the only criticism that I can make that Microsoft doesn’t seem to be actively addressing is the fact that the data visualisation functionality is relatively weak. If you know what you’re doing and you have the patience, you can create good-looking reports. For people like me who have minimal artistic talent and limited patience the experience of building reports can be frustrating. There are some features like small multiples that I can’t believe are still not implemented in the core product, and nothing to help users to follow good data visualisation practice. R visuals and custom visuals help fill the gap (I was quite impressed by this one by Business Solution Group, for example, which isn’t available in the gallery) but really Microsoft need to put some more thought into this area.
Analysis Services
There’s been a lot of good news in the world of Analysis Services this year too. SSAS Tabular 2016 dealt with a lot of the shortcomings that dogged it in 2012 and 2014: a much faster and less buggy development experience; many-to-many relationships supported using bi-directional cross filtering; and powerful new DAX functions and features like variables. SSAS Tabular v.next promises even more great new features such as the integration of the M language. These changes and the fact it’s now available in Standard Edition mean that Tabular should be the default choice over Multidimensional for almost all new SSAS projects.
Sadly, it looks like the neglect of Multidimensional will continue for the foreseeable future. I stopped being angry about this a long time ago and I understand that Microsoft need to concentrate their resources on SSAS Tabular and Power BI, but a lot of Multidimensional customers are now wondering where they stand. Either Microsoft needs to show some commitment to Multidimensional by adding new features – it wouldn’t take much to make a difference – or add features to Tabular that make it possible for more Multidimensional users to migrate over to it, for example equivalents to Scope statements or calculated members on non-Measures dimensions.
Last of all, Azure SSAS opens up a lot of exciting new possibilities for both on-prem SSAS users as well as Power BI users. Kasper does a great job of summing them up here and I won’t repeat what he has to say; once again I’m seeing a lot of interest from my customers and I’m sure I’ll be helping a few to migrate to the cloud very soon. The pricing seems a bit excessive at the moment, even when you take into account the ability to pause servers, and I hope it changes before RTM. Also it’s SSAS Tabular only at this stage but support for Multidimensional is by far the top-voted request on the feedback forum, with more than five times as many votes as the next highest request, so maybe this will be Microsoft’s opportunity to show some love to the Multidimensional world?
