Hi everybody,
I was an employee in the years 1999 to 2001 and responsible for the "IFS BI".
In these times IFS promoted Cognos (series 7). Later on - now self employed - I did a lot of
MS SQL Server based BI projects (most of them on Navision and Axapta).
Since 2 years we are back on the IFS track.
The customer we are working 70% our time with use PowerBI.
We tested different scenarios:
Using the "onboard IFS BI": very, very complex (over 700 SSIS packages) but shallow in main dimensions like customer or item.
Building a seperate DWH structure:
IFS does have round about 6000 tables and 6000 views.
Extracting, transforming and filling into cubes solved a lot of specifications.
We created multi-dim and tabulare cubes.
Because of the need of often more than 20 columns in a list like PBI report we quickly faced performace issues.
So additional datamarts in an extra DWH_PBI solved that.
Just for fun, we connected PBI directly with ORACLE Views/Tables.
This is technical not a problem at all but you have to have a strategy to handle the ever increasing complexity.
So the answer is: it depends!
PBI is a great tool with an interesting future. But you have to take care about business needs, the related complexity and performance issues.
Looking forward to hear more about that question!
best regards
Michael
