If your technology stack doesn’t revolve around Microsoft products, you may run into small hiccups here and there. Power BI is powerful, but will always work best with tools in the Microsoft ecosystem.You have the option to use the series of menus and options to build a simple query with little to no code, or you can go to advanced settings and use SQL directly. Power Query Editorallows you to build queries in Power BI. Microsoft’s Power BI is a business intelligence tool that’s integrated into the Microsoft ecosystem alongside Excel, Access, SQL Server, and others.

Each has a unique way of dealing with SQL and visualizing data, so what’s good for other companies may not be the right choice for you. If you need a more polished tool that’s ready to go out of the box, a paid data-visualization tool for SQL is a good way to go. We’ve compared different business intelligence tools before, but knowing how each interacts with SQL in order to create data visualizations will help you decide on the right tool for your organization. And the answers you do find will then help you make data-driven decisions about your business that can develop into a significant competitive advantage.

One way of thinking about it is that SQL allows you to ask questions and get answers about your data, and each BI tool provides a different method for asking those questions and delivering answers. In fact, it’s so important that one of the defining characteristics separating business intelligence tools from each other is how they use SQL. SQL, or structured query language, is an integral part of business intelligence because it’s the only way to speak to relational databases.

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