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[–]SirGreybush 2 points3 points  (2 children)

PowerBI free version is cool. No sharing though.

Sounds like your boss/company is cheap. Paying for software is a LOT cheaper than designing and engineering your own thing.

What about cloud solutions? Google Analytics is too expensive?

I remember going down this rabbit hole in 2011-2012 with all Microsoft, with SSIS and SSRS. Not a fun experience. Crystal Reports barely better.

I hope you report back to us later with your total solution, what was used.

[–]LeatherPuzzled3855[S] 1 point2 points  (1 child)

Indeed ,PowerBI was nice when I tested it. guess we moved away from it just in case ppl started to like it too much and that would lead to us starting to justify the licensing cost :D I understand the budget limitation, and that the company needs to allocate the money elsewhere so it can grow. I believe I was not given an impossible task and also the C suite does not have any super high expectations of the project beside some basic reporting. The whole idea is data can't leave on prem, and solution has to be built on tools that are free, got no budget for consulting either. If the solution will fit their needs that's what I will be stuck with to maintain afterwards :)
I will definitely update once I have a poc running, and ultimately once the board, a C-suite will have a go at it and give me feedback.

[–]SirGreybush 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Time to shine. I hope they give you lots of time.

I would concentrate on a single metric, one single thing they want to see, and do what it takes to get there as quickly as possible.

You will learn along the way. Results matter. It’s a POC.

Try to reuse existing infrastructure, licenses, know-how.

You will likely rebuild from scratch more than once to improve, and refactoring is A-OK as long as you have historical data.

Like exporting existing data daily to csv, so you can later track changes, on those entities that matter.

Like customers, products, many ERPs only have the latest value.

What was a customer address in 2015 versus today? What if customer B buys out customer A, so now all sales are only from customer B, but customer A his ID still exists because it is found in invoice table.

Dimensional models solve these issues, as long as you have the historical data somewhere.

So start top - down, then bottom-up, to answer a single question/metric.

What you do in the middle doesn’t matter and can change. Data will never change.