We performed a comparison between SAP BW4HANA and Snowflake based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Data Warehouse solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The most valuable feature is that we can transform a huge amount of data and apply business logic as per the requirements."
"One significant advantage of SAP BW/4HANA is the direct integration with the SAP HANA database, providing seamless access to real-time analytics. Additionally, it enables real-time data integration. We don't need to rely on historical data alone; we can provide reporting and features based on real-time information."
"The ability to instantly pull data is the most valuable feature."
"You can do hierarchical alert slicing and dicing out-of-box, which is not available in other solutions. I haven't come across that in Oracle or any other software provider."
"From an ERP point of view and a functionality point of view, it works very well. The benefits are in that of financial costing and material management."
"Some of the main features of this solution are that it uses HANA and it has good performance."
"The solution is based on SAP ERP, so there's some business content already included. For customers who use SAP ERP, SAP BW4HANA is a good choice for their DW implementation."
"The processes are the most valuable aspect of this solution."
"The most valuable feature is the clone copy."
"The most valuable feature is the snapshot database. In one second, you can just take a snapshot of the database for test purposes."
"I like the idea that you can assign roles and responsibilities, limiting access to data."
"The thing I find most valuable is that scalability, space storage, and computing power is separate. When you scale up, it is live from one second to the next — constantly available as you scale — so there is no downtime or interruption of services."
"It is a highly scalable solution. There is no limit on storage or computing."
"I like the ability to work with a managed service on the cloud and that is easy to start with."
"The most valuable feature of Snowflake is it's an all-in-one data warehousing solution."
"The pricing is reasonable and matches the rest of the market."
"I would like to be able to design new reports in a future release."
"The solution is not scalable. It does not have a data streaming feature as well."
"From a technical perspective, it could be even more related to legacy systems. The connectivity requirement is quite high and requires systems that are up-to-date."
"It takes too long to escalate problems from the first level of support."
"We cannot integrate with third-party tools like Python or advanced integration options. You can't fine-tune tables within BW or generate specific views or reports."
"If I want to have good reporting, then I have to buy a separate license."
"Challenges arise with real-time client requirements when clients are accustomed to Microsoft Excel's extensive features for data analysis. They expect similar flexibility and customization in the solution, particularly regarding headers displaying keys and descriptions or just keys. Achieving this level of customization can be challenging, and it's an area that may need improvement."
"BW/4HANA could improve query optimization. For example, there could be an error message that pops up when you hover over it if any query fails. That would make it easier to find out what went gone wrong. Guided SAP help tools would make it easier for us to go forward."
"The documentation could improve. They should provide architecture information."
"Its transaction application needs improvement."
"I think that Snowflake could improve its user interface. The current one is not interactive."
"We would like to be able to do modeling with Snowflake. It should support statistical modeling."
"There could be better ELT tools that are appropriate for Snowflake. We decided on Matillion and it seemed to be the only one. There need to be better choices, it would be great if Snowflake provided an ELT solution that people could use. Additionally, if there was a pure cloud-based ELT tool it would be useful."
"Room for improvement would be writebacks. It doesn't support extensively writing back to the database, and it doesn't support web applications effectively. Ultimately, it's a database call, so if we are building web applications using Snowflake, it isn't that effective because there is some turnaround time from the database."
"The solution should offer an on-premises version also. We have some requirements where we would prefer to use it as a template."
"The pricing of the solution should be much easier to calculate or find by yourself."
SAP BW4HANA is ranked 8th in Data Warehouse with 36 reviews while Snowflake is ranked 1st in Data Warehouse with 94 reviews. SAP BW4HANA is rated 7.4, while Snowflake is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of SAP BW4HANA writes "Performs all necessary data warehouse tasks and offers additional functionalities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Snowflake writes "Good usability, good data sharing and elastic compute features, and requires less DBA involvement". SAP BW4HANA is most compared with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, SAP HANA, Amazon Redshift, SQL Server and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, whereas Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Teradata, Vertica and Oracle Exadata. See our SAP BW4HANA vs. Snowflake report.
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