Visual Formulas Vs DAX - Making a Case for InfoRiver (with Marco Russo as Moderator)

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Power BI has recently done a dedicated blog on Inforiver (link below) to highlight a new set of capabilities. So the owner of Lumel Visuals Gopal is going to discuss and debate the new architecture approach adopted by Inforiver. Marco Russo will also be a moderator in the livestream, as he’s advocated for visual level calculations with his blog (link below), and Inforiver delivers these new capabilities to Power BI.
Join us as we use our unique industry backgrounds to provide perspectives on how InfoRiver can be a smooth transition for Excel users to Power BI using a no-code visual-level calculation user-experience. We will also discuss how developers and business end users can benefit from specific features such as: Visual Formulas, Excel like Formatting, Commenting, Planning, Paginated Reports, and Write-Back capabilities.
RELATED CONTENT 🔗
Microsoft InfoRiver Blog Post -- bit.ly/msft_inforiver_blog
InfoRiver -- inforiver.com
Lumel -- lumel.com
SQLBI Visual Formulas -- bit.ly/visual-calculations
SQLBI -- www.sqlbi.com/
Marco's Twitter -- / marcorus
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[@gxsoft]

Thanks Friends
Gopal, Marco, Reid
for sharing with us, the mortal people.!
Great Ideas!
gab
Rio Cuarto, Argentina

[@HavensConsulting]

Our pleasure!

[@decentmendreams]

Hi Reid, Marco and Gopal,
This products dexterity reminds me that of Tabula Editor. It would take you a full day to exhaustively list its feature . This is truly an awesome product that I have almost stop using all the other visuals I dearly committed to. One thing I want you to pay close attention is that this product becomes very laggy in the power bi services if you have rows exceeding 60K which the native matrix has no issue . Sometimes it takes over a three minutes just to download the figures.

[@gopakris]

Micael, fair observation. Native matrix loads only one level at a time and also uses scrolling technique to fetch rows only that are visible. While it is great for performance - it seriously limits the ability to offer features and functionalities Inforiver is able to offer. So, we took a different architectural approach to load all the data into the visual so you get robust set of features like Excel. Inforiver is great for data volumes that you typically work with excel (optimized for max of 30K rows ). While we don’t have hard row limit, Inforiver does slow down as you stretch it for longer or wider tables. However, Inforiver engineering team is working on few items in the SDK API side with Microsoft team to improve the performance and user experience around it and we will improve and provide customers few mode options in the upcoming months. Also, by design native visuals executes first and then all custom visuals and that also creates laggy feeling when compared to native visuals. Rest assured, we have a very committed team and it will only get better from here

[@carlosmontejo223]

This add-on offers Excel-like features in Power BI. It's nice, but anyone who exports curated data from PBI to Excel knows that stand-alone Excel is more robust. PBI is optimized for displaying visuals, not merely Excel/matrix/spreadsheet data. I like the concept, but don't see it as ground-breaking from a user perspective; although it's a marvel from a technological viewpoint. It does offer agility to many users, so I believe it will be useful for many non-DAX users. After all the cynicism, I would use it occasionally.

[@HavensConsulting]

The value for me is that you have all the excel-like features WITH forecast, planning, pagination, scheduled exports, write-back, IBCS certified visuals, and many more. Built right into a Power BI report page environment.

[@wayneedmondson1065]

Interesting discussion! Thanks for sharing your thoughts and insights. Thumbs up!!

[@HavensConsulting]

Thanks for watching!

[@mikhailstotskiy9960]

In a purely dax if we need 4 columns engine should calculate 4 measures fact, budget, fact minus budget, fact divide budget. With calculation group there are still 4 measures
With visual formulas we need only 2 measures, so dax will be slower
Is it true?

[@HavensConsulting]

Hi Mikhail, by "slower" what do you mean? Slower performance, slower to write? With Inforiver if you provide Sales and Budget, the rest of the variance calculations are auto-generated by the tool. So you are correct that only two are required before access the auto-variances from there. So it will be faster to get to see the data and then arrive at insights from that. From a modeling performance perspective, a well written DAX measure would be as fast as the auto generated variances. But then you would need to code those measures which take time, and modelling knowledge. The power of InfoRiver comes from the speed that you can create the visual, add your data, get insights with a couple clicks. :)

[@mikhailstotskiy9960]

Reid, thank you very much
We need clear understanding, so please what you think
We've got 100 mln rows in a fact table and 10 rows in inforiver app and 2 measures in it, fact and budget.
If we would add a third measure divide ( fact, budget ) from model dax will scan 100 mln rows. It is time, if inforiver just use 10 visual rows to calculate custom column it should be much faster, or i'm wrong?

[@HavensConsulting]

@@mikhailstotskiy9960 Either InfoRiver or a native matrix visual still needs to scan the original fact table (100m) rows in order to summarize to the 10 rows. InfoRiver would first aggregate your 10m rows using an auto-generated DAX query to return the summarized 10 rows. A divide function inside of the visual would then do a division of the two values of those 10 rows. Performance-wise there still wouldn't be much of a difference. Visual level calculations are more designed to create logic easily, because it will calculate against the values you can simply see in the visual (table) in this instance.

[@kaly5834]

Seems to me that this is what PBI Report Builder should have been. Instead of renaming SSRS report builder and claiming it was a new application. MSFT has a new challenger to Report Builder, not PBI.