The Wow Effect of Power BI
Like most developers I know, I've never liked Microsoft. They might be one of the greatest companies ever, but I've had difficuly with most of their products I've tried using.
In the last few months, I've been working on this amazing marketing intelligence application. As is the case with most startups, we couldn’t create a development plan and stick to it. We tried things, compared results, then kept trying until we were sure what we had was good.
As you can guess, we had to gather a lot of data to actually make it intelligent. As usual, when it comes to drawing smart conclusions, you need to turn on the third screen on your office desk to be able to view all those graphs and pies. The challenge was: how to compute the data from those data sets with more than 10M records and organize everything together? How do we export that data for further analyses? We couldn’t go with Excel sheet exports (whoever has tried, knows) or display this data without reinventing the wheel.
That is when we found Power BI. In the beginning, I was skeptical. However, we managed to connect our production database with Power BI in a few minutes, through a remote connection. We managed to create all the reports we needed as well as set up some “on the fly” calculations pretty quickly as well.
It took another few weeks for us to create data mining scripts, leveraging the easy integration with R. Once again, Power BI was simply amazing. Combined with Azure, we managed to embed all the reports within the web application and transfer the great experience we were getting on the Desktop app to our users. Even though the CLI they released is a bit buggy, I used it to build a PHP wrapper on top of it.
In the end, it turned out that most of our business model is driven by Power BI, something I couldn’t believe would happen.
Power BI amazed me. Considering the rest of the positive changes Microsoft has made in the last few years, from completely transforming the IE, from TypeScript to Cognitive Services, to other developer friendly tools, I'm starting to believe they are back to empowering every person and every organization to achieve more. Good job!
