SAP Business Warehouse vs Snowflake comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between SAP Business Warehouse and Snowflake based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Cloud Data Warehouse solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
To learn more, read our detailed SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake Report (Updated: March 2024).
763,955 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"In terms of stability, comparatively, the solution is quite stable.""The most valuable feature of SAP Business Warehouse is transformation, where I extract data from different sources, particularly the raw data. Then I do some transformations and store that in a format that allows me to do reporting easily.""Having the integration with the reporting tool which is provided by SAP is great.""What I like most about SAP Business Warehouse is its ability to feed data into new, multiple systems in various formats. It can open its data to any system over gateway services or a portal or application that needs to consume and analyze data.""With the technical support, the response has been pretty good from the SAP side.""The key element in this solution is its rapid response. If you have a question about prices, buyers, customers, providers, or services, you need the answer in a minute or two. That's the key benefit for us that a solution like BW gives us.""The warehouse is the solution's most valuable feature.""Now, because of the HANA integration, the hard disk and RAM are together, and because of that, the output is very quick and very fast actually."

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"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 was relatively easy to use, and it was easy for people to convert to it.""Data sharing is a good feature. It is a majorly used feature. The elastic compute is another big feature. Separating compute and storage gives you flexibility. It doesn't require much DBA involvement because it doesn't need any performance tuning. We are not really doing any performance tuning, and the entire burden of performance tuning and SQL tuning is on Snowflake. Its usability is very good. I don't need to ramp up any user, and its onboarding is easier. You just onboard the user, and you are done with it. There are simple SQL and UI, and people are able to use this solution easily. Ease of use is a big thing in Snowflake.""The Time Travel feature is helpful for accessing historical data and the ability to clone external tables is useful.""Snowflake is an enormously useful platform. The Snowpipe feature is valuable because it allows us to load terabytes and petabytes of data into the data mart at a very low cost.""I like the idea that you can assign roles and responsibilities, limiting access to data.""The most valuable feature of Snowflake is it's an all-in-one data warehousing solution.""Scaling is a big plus point of Snowflake."

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Cons
"There is room for improvement from a technical perspective.""One of our requirements is the ability to easily get answers regarding trends and exceptions. In BW, it is not that easy to get such information. I expect better trend and exception detection, better pattern detection.""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.""The solution should be more open to the cloud.""The advanced structuring can be complicated and the interface is not very intuitive.""More integration with Microsoft Office products (not just Excel) would be helpful.""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.""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."

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"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.""Availability is a problem.""There are some stored procedures that we've had trouble with. The solution also needs to fine-tune the connectors to be able to connect into the system source.""The solution could improve by allowing non-structured data, such as PDFs, images, or videos. We cannot see the data.""We would like to be able to do modeling with Snowflake. It should support statistical modeling.""We would like to have an on-premises deployment option that has the same features, including scalability.""The design of the product is easily misunderstood.""Its transaction application needs improvement."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "It's moderately expensive, but definitely has its branding and price value for it."
  • "It's quite pricey. SAP changed its pricing policy, so they give you one engine and then you have to buy everything next to it, like MSS, the BPC licenses, and everything else."
  • "The license for SAP Business Warehouse is paid yearly, and there's no extra cost in addition to the standard licensing fees."
  • "Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive."
  • "The licensing cost for SAP Business Warehouse depends on your revenue. Its licensing structure is a little bit complicated. The more your revenue is, the higher the price, but SAP does have different pricing structures for various companies. For small businesses, licensing isn't based on revenue, but for big companies, it's revenue-based. There's some agreement regarding pricing for huge companies, so it's different, and SAP Business Warehouse pricing isn't fixed. On a scale of one to ten, I'm rating the licensing cost for SAP Business Warehouse as five because it's very high. As your revenue grows, your licensing cost also increases, so you have to factor that in when calculating your cost."
  • "SAP Business Warehouse licensing is a bit expensive compared to other products in the market."
  • "I would not recommend it to small-scale companies. The price is too much."
  • "The solution is quite expensive."
  • More SAP Business Warehouse Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Pricing can be confusing for customers."
  • "The whole licensing system is based on credit points. You can also make a license agreement with the company so that you buy credit points and then you use them. What you do not use in one year can be carried over to the next year."
  • "You pay based on the data that you are storing in the data warehouse and there are no maintenance costs."
  • "It is not cheap."
  • "The pricing for Snowflake is competitive."
  • "On average, with the number of queries that we run, we pay approximately $200 USD per month."
  • "Pricing is approximately $US 50 per DB. Terabyte is around $US 50 per month."
  • "The price of Snowflake is very reasonable."
  • More Snowflake Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The solution is quite expensive. We paid a yearly subscription fee.
    Top Answer:Over a period, we realized that the license and maintenance costs were quite expensive. Every day, we had to run the background job ODS. Eventually, we moved away from SAP Business Warehouse and… more »
    Top Answer:The best thing about Snowflake is its flexibility in changing warehouse sizes or computational power.
    Top Answer:The real-time streaming feature is limited with Snowflake and could be improved. Currently, Snowflake doesn't support unstructured data. With Snowflake, you need to be very particular about the type… more »
    Ranking
    8th
    Views
    1,355
    Comparisons
    854
    Reviews
    13
    Average Words per Review
    626
    Rating
    7.8
    1st
    Views
    23,526
    Comparisons
    13,527
    Reviews
    40
    Average Words per Review
    455
    Rating
    8.4
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Snowflake Computing
    Learn More
    Overview

    Reporting, analysis and interpretation of business data are crucial to preserve and enhance the competitive edge of companies by optimizing processes and enabling them to react quickly and in line with market needs. SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) provides tools and functions that enable companies to attain these goals. In SAP BW, you can integrate, transform, and consolidate relevant business information from productive SAP applications and external data sources. SAP BW provides you with a high-performance infrastructure that helps you evaluate and interpret data. Decision makers can make well-founded decisions and identify target-orientated activities on the basis of the analyzed data.

    Snowflake is a cloud-based data warehousing solution for storing and processing data, generating reports and dashboards, and as a BI reporting source. It is used for optimizing costs and using financial data, as well as for migrating data from on-premises to the cloud. The solution is often used as a centralized data warehouse, combining data from multiple sources.

    Snowflake has helped organizations improve query performance, store and process JSON and XML, consolidate multiple databases into one unified table, power company-wide dashboards, increase productivity, reduce processing time, and have easy maintenance with good technical support.

    Its platform is made up of three components:

    1. Cloud services - Snowflake uses ANSI SQL to empower users to optimize their data and manage their infrastructure, while Snowflake handles the security and encryption of stored data.
    2. Query processing - Snowflake's compute layer is made up of virtual cloud data warehouses that let you analyze data through requests. Each of the warehouses does not compete for computing resources, nor do they affect the performance of each other.
    3. Database storage - Snowflake automatically manages all parts of the data storage process, including file size, compression, organization, structure, metadata, and statistics.

    Snowflake has many valuable vital features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Snowflake architecture provides nearly unlimited scalability and high speed because it uses a single elastic performance engine. The solution also supports unlimited concurrent users and workloads, from interactive to batch.
    • Snowflake makes automation easy and enables enterprises to automate data management, security, governance, availability, and data resiliency.
    • With seamless cross-cloud and cross-region connections, Snowflake eliminates ETL and data silos. Anyone who needs access to shared secure data can get a single copy via the data cloud. In addition, Snowflake makes remote collaboration and decision-making fast and easy via a single shared data source.
    • Snowflake’s Data Marketplace offers third-party data, which allows you to connect with Snowflake customers to extend workflows with data services and third-party applications.

    There are many benefits to implementing Snowflake. It helps optimize costs, reduce downtime, improve operational efficiency, and automate data replication for fast recovery, and it is built for high reliability and availability.

      Below are quotes from interviews we conducted with users currently using the Snowflake solution:

      Sreenivasan R., Director of Data Architecture and Engineering at Decision Minds, says, "Data sharing is a good feature. It is a majorly used feature. The elastic computing is another big feature. Separating computing and storage gives you flexibility. It doesn't require much DBA involvement because it doesn't need any performance tuning. We are not doing any performance tuning, and the entire burden of performance and SQL tuning is on Snowflake. Its usability is very good. I don't need to ramp up any user, and its onboarding is easier. You just onboard the user, and you are done with it. There are simple SQL and UI, and people are able to use this solution easily. Ease of use is a big thing in Snowflake."

      A director of business operations at a logistics company mentions, "It requires no maintenance on our part. They handle all that. The speed is phenomenal. The pricing isn't really anything more than what you would be paying for a SQL server license or another tool to execute the same thing. We have zero maintenance on our side to do anything and the speed at which it performs queries and loads the data is amazing. It handles unstructured data extremely well, too. So, if the data is in a JSON array or an XML, it handles that super well."

      A Solution Architect at a wholesaler/distributor comments, "The ability to share the data and the ability to scale up and down easily are the most valuable features. The concept of data sharing and data plumbing made it very easy to provide and share data. The ability to refresh your Dev or QA just by doing a clone is also valuable. It has the dynamic scale up and scale down feature. Development and deployment are much easier as compared to other platforms where you have to go through a lot of stuff. With a tool like DBT, you can do modeling and transformation within a single tool and deploy to Snowflake. It provides continuous deployment and continuous integration abilities. There is a separation of storage and compute, so you only get charged for your usage. You only pay for what you use. When we share the data downstream with business partners, we can specifically create compute for them, and we can charge back the business."

      Sample Customers
      Medtronic, Cirque du Soleil, Antarc, B&G Manufacturing, EarlySense, eBay, Ferrero, James Austin Company, Lenovo, Sagem, RAK Ceramics, Vodafone
      Accordant Media, Adobe, Kixeye Inc., Revana, SOASTA, White Ops
      Top Industries
      REVIEWERS
      Insurance Company19%
      Non Tech Company13%
      Energy/Utilities Company13%
      Manufacturing Company13%
      VISITORS READING REVIEWS
      Computer Software Company13%
      Manufacturing Company11%
      Financial Services Firm8%
      Government7%
      REVIEWERS
      Computer Software Company29%
      Financial Services Firm20%
      Healthcare Company6%
      Manufacturing Company6%
      VISITORS READING REVIEWS
      Educational Organization26%
      Financial Services Firm13%
      Computer Software Company10%
      Manufacturing Company6%
      Company Size
      REVIEWERS
      Small Business24%
      Midsize Enterprise16%
      Large Enterprise60%
      VISITORS READING REVIEWS
      Small Business20%
      Midsize Enterprise14%
      Large Enterprise66%
      REVIEWERS
      Small Business24%
      Midsize Enterprise20%
      Large Enterprise55%
      VISITORS READING REVIEWS
      Small Business15%
      Midsize Enterprise33%
      Large Enterprise52%
      Buyer's Guide
      SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake
      March 2024
      Find out what your peers are saying about SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
      763,955 professionals have used our research since 2012.

      SAP Business Warehouse is ranked 8th in Cloud Data Warehouse with 13 reviews while Snowflake is ranked 1st in Cloud Data Warehouse with 39 reviews. SAP Business Warehouse is rated 7.8, while Snowflake is rated 8.4. 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 Snowflake writes "Easy to set up with great cloning and time travel". SAP Business Warehouse is most compared with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, SAP BW4HANA and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, whereas Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Teradata, Vertica and AWS Lake Formation. See our SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake report.

      See our list of best Cloud Data Warehouse vendors and best Data Warehouse vendors.

      We monitor all Cloud Data Warehouse reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.