We performed a comparison between SAP Business Warehouse 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."We are currently in a basic stage of analytics and the first goal we have is to make sure the numbers are correct. BW has some features that help you to build factors and ETL in such a way that it's easy to get to correct responses. That's the number one condition that you have to have in an analytic solution."
"Having the integration with the reporting tool which is provided by SAP is great."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is the integration with SAP ERP."
"The solution has functionality that makes it easy for end-users to readily extract data directly from Business Warehouse into Excel and carry on their analysis on their own."
"What I like most about SAP Business Warehouse is that it's a seamless integration platform. A valuable feature in the tool is the monitoring alert that makes you aware of what process chain has failed. There's no manual monitoring required if you have configured an alert system, so the process chain can run in the background, and you can get alerts about it. The functionalities I find good in SAP Business Warehouse are alerting and monitoring. If you have configured the tool and have integrated it with SAP Solution Manager, then it's a good product to use."
"I like that it integrates to open-source."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the advanced structuring of data capabilities. You can get different structures of data to suit your needs."
"The most useful feature is definitely the speed."
"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."
"SAP BW4HANA aids in managing data from ER to front-end analysis, contributes to ROI, and fosters business growth understanding. I like that the solution breaks down components to a very granular level, allowing for customization and implementation based on specific requirements. The solution is stable. The solution is scalable."
"We can get good visualization and less redundant data."
"The solution's performance is really good. Also, it's easy to operate, easy to administer, and relatively simple to install."
"The most valuable aspect of this solution is that the infrastructure is easy to understand."
"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."
"The solution is useful for connecting with external systems."
"What I'd like to improve in SAP Business Warehouse is its data structure, that's a little bit rigid. It could be a bit more flexible, so you can design your data structure and improve performance when creating a solution. Currently, the way data is stored in SAP Business Warehouse is rigid."
"The problem with BW, and the factor that differentiated it from the original BW, is that you only get limited functionality with your runtime license. So, you have to pay extra for extracting data."
"A few things which are missing include the visualization of reports. That's where your costs and licensing become heavy. When it comes to this database compared Microsoft Warehouse, it's an expensive solution."
"Areas for improvement in SAP Business Warehouse include enhancing scheduling and monitoring tools, as well as improving communication about hidden features to make them more accessible to users."
"It's a product that is at the end of life so they will not improve it anymore."
"It takes more work to get the data, including reporting on that data, because some coding is required, and a significant level of transformation is needed when using SAP Business Warehouse."
"I'm not sure if our issue is related to BW or the Analysis Office. However, we're having performance issues in terms of time. It takes a long time to generate the report."
"SAP Business Warehouse could integrate better with other ETL tools."
"Pricing would be a good improvement. A lot of customers think that it's very expensive and especially support is very expensive."
"I don't see SAP actively supporting the solution now...a better support from SAP would be appreciated."
"If I want to have good reporting, then I have to buy a separate license."
"One thing that could be enhanced in SAP BW4HANA is the user interface for process chains."
"It's complicated to use. You need to spend a lot of time learning about it. The interface could be improved. It's not intuitive to build a data model and use their ETL tools."
"Support could be more reliable."
"In the next release, I would like to see their BI component introduced with a mobile version, as it is not currently present."
"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."
SAP Business Warehouse is ranked 9th in Cloud Data Warehouse with 25 reviews while SAP BW4HANA is ranked 8th in Data Warehouse with 37 reviews. SAP Business Warehouse is rated 7.8, while SAP BW4HANA is rated 7.4. The top reviewer of SAP Business Warehouse writes "Offers powerful analytics and integration capabilities but requires improved upgrade processes". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SAP BW4HANA writes "Performs all necessary data warehouse tasks and offers additional functionalities". SAP Business Warehouse is most compared with Snowflake, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, BigQuery, SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse and Amazon Redshift, whereas SAP BW4HANA is most compared with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, Snowflake, SAP HANA, Amazon Redshift and SAP IQ. See our SAP BW4HANA vs. SAP Business Warehouse report.
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