We performed a comparison between Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics and SAP BW4HANA 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."Scaling this solution is easy and the uptime is okay."
"Its seamless integration with Azure services is most valuable. If somebody wants to use all Azure services, it is the best solution."
"The most valuable features of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics are the user experience because it is easy to make analyses, load different databases, and different resources. Our end users can do the analysis by themselves without IT supervising. This is a great aspect of the solution, it's better for our environment."
"The ability to scale out services on-demand and scale them down when they are not required is most valuable. You are in control of your expenditures, and you are also in control of the horsepower that you need. That's a major advantage."
"I have not used the technical support from Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, but I worked with the developers at Microsoft who were top-notch."
"The pricing seems to be quite fair."
"The solution has been working well overall."
"They are available on the Cloud, and the platform is very intuitive."
"The solution is useful for connecting with external systems."
"It is a stable solution."
"The most valuable features are the speed of reporting and the HANA database."
"Out of the box, this solution has a lot of standard features."
"The product is stable."
"The solution seamlessly integrates with SAP products."
"I like how it blends no-code and ABAP code for complex transformations during data loading."
"It can calculate data in detail. Before we could not calculate financial documents and accountant documents in detail, we could not do it at a document level but now we can. This is the most important feature. It also has predictive analysis memory."
"The security performance and cost are the two things that needs improvement."
"The product could be more feature-rich."
"If I'm looking for something good in the cloud, I would want it to have better standard connectors."
"One area that could be improved is the schema management."
"With respect to what needs to be improved, concurrent connectivity has some limitations."
"The performance and data consistency need to be improved."
"The only issue that we have run into with the solutions performance is with regards to concurrency."
"I would like to see more ready-to-use products from Synapse. Right now, everything seems a bit futuristic without much modern use."
"Not a ten because it's expensive and its ecosystem is not very open."
"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."
"In the next release, I would like to see their BI component introduced with a mobile version, as it is not currently present."
"Support could be more reliable."
"Pricing would be a good improvement. A lot of customers think that it's very expensive and especially support is very expensive."
"There's one area where the other vendors have an upper edge, which is the data lake. I think SAP is trying to figure out whether to stick with IQ, their own data lake solution, or push customers toward customer-preferred vendors, like Azure Data Lake, AWS, or any other provider."
"Other competitors provide better solutions that are more up to date with current technology."
"They have taken out a few BW functionalities when they redesigned this. The way of multi-dimensional thinking and star schema got a little bit lost. It may be because of the cost, but certain functionalities that were previously implemented from the BW side should come back again in the whole product. It is a young product. It is version 2.0. In time, I'm pretty sure they will come back again because otherwise, it limits the potential of the product, and I have to do a lot of modeling towards that direction. For me, the analytics focus is too much. It is not cube-oriented in that way, so its functionality is limited. It is not really technically limited in the back end; it is more limited in the front end. It has a data-mining mindset for SQL developers. The navigational attributes should be easy. It needs to be built in models. I see the data mark cube or understanding that the composite provider needs to be models in a cube coming back. The multi-dimensional star schema approach and the reporting need to be done as well as possible to leverage the star scheme below. This is definitely not understood by many consultants and even composite providers for star schema. They always think in terms of flat tables, which is limiting. You need to build the right dimensions, objects, and so on. If you can build this in BW4HANA, then you have this understanding that BW4HANA is not forcing you in this direction, but it should force you a bit better in this direction. Maybe a few elements which were in use in BW should come back again. It would help the community to determine the direction to build on the cube. You can have maybe 50 elements, and then you can expand it to what you need by leveraging navigation. So far, this functionality is a little bit limited in the tool, and it is not thought through, but I think it will come. They should also be adding more capabilities for the transformation between different objects. In BW, this is currently limited, especially towards composite providers. It is a bit complex basically in the building. You have to have a lot of knowledge as well as know how to do it better because it is a bit different from BW. There is not too much expertise currently in the consulting markets. Many are trying to build something, but it may be based on their knowledge of what they have from the BW and HANA side. You have to find the right mix from both of them at this time. We also have HANA Native. These are our two different sync sources basically, and we have approaches to connect nicely, but it is hard to manage your team because a lot of coaching is required."
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Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is ranked 2nd in Cloud Data Warehouse with 86 reviews while SAP BW4HANA is ranked 8th in Data Warehouse with 36 reviews. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is rated 7.8, while SAP BW4HANA is rated 7.4. The top reviewer of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics writes "No competitors provide the entire solution to one place ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SAP BW4HANA writes "An easy-to-operate and administer tool that needs to consider revising its existing licensing cost". Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is most compared with Azure Data Factory, Snowflake, Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, Teradata and Amazon Redshift, whereas SAP BW4HANA is most compared with Snowflake, SAP HANA, Amazon Redshift, SQL Server and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse. See our Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. SAP BW4HANA report.
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