Microsoft's Power BI might be an obvious choice if you want to keep everything in the Microsoft ecosystem. But if you don't feel like limiting yourself to Microsoft product, Metabase could be a good option. Metabase is the most effective way to let everyone in the team start working with data. With a low learning curve and sophisticated but easy-to-use data tools like the Query Builder which lets people ask questions without SQL, simple drill-through, zoom-in, and breakout functionality that let people learn more from data with just a few clicks.

You can set up and connect Metabase to Microsoft SQL Server in about 5 minutes and be querying immediately, with drill-through functionality automatically generated and ready for people to start uncovering insights. Metabase is also open source and affordable, with plans and pricing that scales with you.

You can connect to Microsoft SQL Server when you’re setting up a new Metabase instance, or add a database connection any time in your admins settings:

To add a database connection, click on the gear icon in the top right, and navigate to Admin settings > Databases > Add a database.

For the full details on connecting Metabase to Microsoft SQL Server, check out our documentation.

Yes! Permissions set up in your Microsoft SQL Server database can be impersonated in Metabase (This is currently only possible for PostgreSQL, MySQL, Snowflake, and ClickHouse databases).

Learn more about impersonated permissions in our documentation.

Metabase fits with Microsoft SQL Server as a querying and visualization layer on top of your data. With Metabase you can query data in Microsoft SQL Server - with or without SQL - to create a broad range of data visualizations and types and tell a story with interactive dashboards. Viewers can filter and drill-through to get what’s most relevant, and dig deeper on what’s important to them. Visualizations and dashboards can even be shared or embedded in your app.

Metabase makes it possible for everyone in the team to run their own reports, without data skills or relying on someone else to write SQL for them. People used to working in Excel can leverage skills usually reserved for spreadsheets to get the answers they need from data in Microsoft SQL Server.

Metabase lets you bring together charts, visualizations, and questions into interactive dashboards that can be shared with your team and customers.

The automatically generated drill-through menu lets people click on charts to zero in on a particular category or parameter for further analysis; view individual records, or zoom in on a targeted date range. You can also add filters to let people slice the data on what’s most important to them, and add custom-click behaviors to guide data discovery (e.g. send people to a related dashboard).