PowerBI

PowerBI

Utilities / Analytics / General Analytics
Needs advice
on
PowerBIPowerBIQlikQlik
and
TableauTableau

Hello everyone,

My team and I are currently in the process of selecting a Business Intelligence (BI) tool for our actively developing company, which has over 500 employees. We are considering open-source options.

We are keen to connect with a Head of Analytics or BI Analytics professional who has extensive experience working with any of these systems and is willing to share their insights. Ideally, we would like to speak with someone from companies that have transitioned from proprietary BI tools (such as PowerBI, Qlik, or Tableau) to open-source BI tools, or vice versa.

If you have any contacts or recommendations for individuals we could reach out to regarding this matter, we would greatly appreciate it. Additionally, if you are personally willing to share your experiences, please feel free to reach out to me directly. Thank you!

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7 upvotes·29.6K views
Replies (2)
Avatar of oruc
Owner at Alorya art ·

Hi,

I am the owner of my actual company, we are dealing in architectural design and software development. As the owner as I have many years of experience in coding cost control management and business management, I can understand quite well your request.

There are some things which will not help you in your business and other that will help you.

On my opinion Tableau, PowerBI or Qilk will not make huge difference to you. They are all good, and very powerful, you can find good comparison sites for choosing any of them. just search google with "Tableau vs PowerBi" and it will give you sites of people having written very good analysis and comparison for each of them. i highky recommend you do this way

But, if you wish to see deeper in your business, I can recommend you other things, that many software sellers won`t tell you.

In my life, I generally coded the softwares (since 2002) that would do the same thing as them. The first time I did it, was, when I was employee in a construction company. It was for its oil and gas project. My softwares were free for ever.

The things about these softwares are not in the software. I can tell it, because after coding the softwares I was assigned for managing them. The problem was never on the software side. But always personnel behavious was the problem.

I learned to resolve personel problem by learning/ having a course of ISO 9000.

Of course I am a motivational talker, and this helped me. people were enthusiastic to apply ISO 9000 and use the software because I gave the motivational talk.

So to be successful with the software you need human behavioral things next to it.

No matter what you choose, if you see these problems happening (personnel resistance, or refusing, or slowing or blaming the software for the mistakes etc) just remember my advice, it will be a great help to you.

Also if you do not wish to loose money, try first the opensource alternatives to these software. I have many writings about software business and technical stuff about business. I shared my experiences:

I shared with you, one of my blog about your question. Hope it helps:

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Industry Trade Construction Business and Project Management: Business Management opensource free sofwares (trade-industry-management.blogspot.com)
1 upvote·2.8K views
Needs advice
on
AirtableAirtableAppSheetAppSheet
and
JotformJotform

We're looking for a better way to gather complex data from our members and provide visualisations in a PDF report or online dashboard. Currently, we use Stacker to collect data, Airtable to store it, and PowerBI Desktop to build reports.

The data we collect is greenhouse gas emissions data, including several years of utility data, vehicle consumption data, waste production, paper consumption, and so on. Hundreds of possible data points for each member with a large degree of variation and dependency within those data points. One member might have a fleet of a hundred vehicles, and we need to know the make/model/year/fuel type of each one, plus the actual fuel consumption, while another member doesn't have any fleet emissions, but produces a large amount of refrigerants, and so on.

Stacker does not give us the dynamic flexibility we need for this ingestion project. Airtable Interfaces could potentially get us there, but we're not sure if it is as sophisticated as we need it to be especially with all the conditionals. We haven't explored Jotform or Appscript or other options yet.

Thanks!

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3 upvotes·8.6K views
Replies (2)
Recommends
on
Five
Five

Hi Sam, sounds like you've stitched together a couple of "best of breed" solutions to accomplish what you need: a data collection interface builder, a database, and a dashboard.

If you want a "whole in one" solution that gives you a flexible database, you could try Five (I'm one of the co-founders). Five builds data-driven web apps.

The advantages of using Five are: 1. You're only paying for one tool instead of three. 2. Five gives you a customizable MySQL database. You can create tables and relationships visually. 3. Five gives you an easy form builder to collect data. You can also create data grids to collect data. 4. You can also create different user roles with different permissions, or public forms for people without their own login. 5. Five lets you create charts and dashboards, but our dashboarding is not as sophisticated as PowerBI (that's the trade-off).

So in a nutshell, if you're looking to replace your current setup with one web application then Five could be a solution.

What are the challenges? The biggest challenge seems to be that you're collecting different data from different users. If you want this data to be collected in a proper database, you'll have to come up with some standardized way of doing this. Conditional ("show-ifs") can easily be created inside of Five and could be one way of setting this up.

If you would like to have a chat with us about how to do this, feel free to sign up on our website and I'll reach out to you separately to set up a Zoom call. Our URL is https://five.co

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Excel to Web App [Quick, Easy & Free 3-Step Tutorial] | Five (five.co)
2 upvotes·2 comments·2.3K views
Sam Fraser
Sam Fraser
·
September 24th 2023 at 12:15AM

Hi there, thanks for responding. Five looks like an interesting solution, though currently our team doesn't have Javascript skills. Can you tell me more about data grids? We're looking for ways users can submit tabular data, such as the cost and consumption of electricity across 12 months. We're also looking for ways to create new instances of the same form, such as a new form for each vehicle in the client's fleet, when we don't know the exact number. More information would be helpful.

·
Reply
Dom-5
Dom-5
·
September 25th 2023 at 2:29AM

Hi Sam, thanks for the response!

To build the application that you have in mind, you don't need to know any JavaScript. Most of it appears to be form and calculation-based, so you could build this with a basic understanding of SQL and point-and-click. The most important part is getting your database model right. Building out the forms, grids or charts is pretty simple after that. In fact, I'd like to think that if you managed to connect Stacker, Airtable, and PowerBI, Five will be a breeze 😁

A data grid gives you an editable, Excel-like interface to insert, update or check data. To see a data grid in action, check out this blog post: https://five.co/blog/free-microsoft-access-alternative/

There's a video right at the top. Go to 08:42min to see the data grid. Inside the data grid, you can filter, hide columns, pin columns, edit data, etc.

Regarding instances, Five lets you create multiple instances of the same application by simply replicating them in point-and-click.

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Reply
Recommends
on
Airtable
Airtable

Hey, there's an extension for Airtable, it's called Documint. It creates PDF and is easy to create templates.

1 upvote·1.8K views
Avatar of john-35
Founder at PerMaas·
Needs advice
on
Oracle PL/SQLOracle PL/SQL
and
Power BIPower BI

Hi!,

Current status:

I designed an online assessment questionnaire. The application is written with PHP server-side scripting and an Oracle MySQL backend database. The data visualisation is utilising PowerBI connecting via the app using the PowerBI API. The application is hosted on a Linux server with the capacity to scale for larger groups available when required.

Future Needs:

I want to automate the processing of the results in the backend database and create individual and organisation results.

Can you advise how best to do this? Regards and thanks. John Conway

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5 upvotes·10.8K views

We need to perform ETL from several databases into a data warehouse or data lake. We want to

  • keep raw and transformed data available to users to draft their own queries efficiently
  • give users the ability to give custom permissions and SSO
  • move between open-source on-premises development and cloud-based production environments

We want to use inexpensive Amazon EC2 instances only on medium-sized data set 16GB to 32GB feeding into Tableau Server or PowerBI for reporting and data analysis purposes.

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5 upvotes·305.4K views
Replies (3)
Recommends
on
Airflow
Airflow
AWS Lambda
AWS Lambda

You could also use AWS Lambda and use Cloudwatch event schedule if you know when the function should be triggered. The benefit is that you could use any language and use the respective database client.

But if you orchestrate ETLs then it makes sense to use Apache Airflow. This requires Python knowledge.

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4 upvotes·239.1K views
Recommends
on
Airflow
Airflow

Though we have always built something custom, Apache airflow (https://airflow.apache.org/) stood out as a key contender/alternative when it comes to open sources. On the commercial offering, Amazon Redshift combined with Amazon Kinesis (for complex manipulations) is great for BI, though Redshift as such is expensive.

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3 upvotes·246.6K views
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