Which BI software do you use and prefer?

[fretted]

In my line of work I use:
Qlikview
Tableau
SAP Business Objects (Inc. Explorer)
Microsoft SSRS

Qlikview is my preferred tool for data analytics, as it has an extremely powerful scripting language, which enables me to push the software beyond what it is designed to.

What do you guys use?

 

[fretted]

I'm interested in this, it looks like we might be going with Tableau. How good is it, assuming it's implemented well. Is that a concern or is it easy to work with?

It is very easy to create simple visuals with Tableau, as long as the data you are feeding it has been flattened, otherwise you should use another tool to denormalise your data first.

 

[fretted]

I have actually built my own solution for my company. As frustrating as it has been it has been the most enjoyable project I have worked on recently.

I have come from a background of using SSRS 2005 - 2012 (which I just hated purely as our production SSRS was running SSRS 2005) and although it worked it never really hit the spot for our users and caused me no end of headaches when changes were required or when people wanted "bespoke" pieces of data (no data models had been created and our users just didn't get on with the report builder features of SSRS)

So as we migrate from our internal system which SSRS was used to support to a more traditional off the shelf product which had limited reporting capabilities. I have built a solution that is capable of aggregating our various data sources and report them in a standard way but also given our users the ability to use a simple "wizard" style approach to building their own version of reports which they can share with other users and modify with a few clicks.

So far it has been running well and although it doesn't have all the fancy features of the more established solutions on the market, it means I can focus on building new features rather than providing them with "bespoke" reports or data dumps because it is a one time request. Plus if a new request comes up for a new "permanent" data source/model I can have these up and running in a matter of minutes rather than the hours it could take me getting SSRS to do what I wanted it to do.

Although we looked at off the shelf BI solutions they were fairly cost prohibitive for a company of our size.

That is pretty impressive, what platform is your reporting solution on? Personally, I would be nervous of users creating their own reports