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."The warehouse is the solution's most valuable feature."
"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 features that I have found most valuable are its capabilities to connect to Excel and to slice and dice."
"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."
"Predominantly, our company uses SAP Business Warehouse for reporting purposes across various departments, especially for managers to gain a quick understanding of their current standing and make informed decisions."
"The most useful feature is definitely the speed."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is the integration with SAP ERP."
"The most valuable feature is the snapshot database. In one second, you can just take a snapshot of the database for test purposes."
"Once you have finished your designs they can be easily imported to Snowflake and the information can be readily accessed without an IT expert."
"Snowflake's most valuable features are data enrichment and flattening."
"The product is quite fast."
"The solution's customer service is good."
"The querying speed is fast."
"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."
"I like the ability to work with a managed service on the cloud and that is easy to start with."
"SAP Business Warehouse could improve by having more out-of-the-box use cases to cover more business types or operations."
"There is room for improvement from a technical perspective."
"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."
"In the next release, my suggestion would be to have user-friendly interfaces and performance issues be addressed."
"The advanced structuring can be complicated and the interface is not very intuitive."
"SAP Business Warehouse could integrate better with other ETL tools."
"It's a product that is at the end of life so they will not improve it anymore."
"I would like to see a different end solution in order to read the data and attract internal users."
"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."
"Portability is a big hurdle right now for our clients. Porting all of your existing SQL ecosystem, such as stored procedures, to Snowflake is a major pain point. Currently, Snowflake stored procedures use JavaScript, but they should support SQL-based stored procedures. It would be a huge advantage if you can write your stored procedures using SQL. It seems that they are working on this feature, and they are yet to release it. I remember seeing some notes saying that they were going to do that in the future, but the sooner this feature comes out, it would be better for Snowflake because there are a lot of clients with whom I'm interacting, and their main hurdle is to take their existing Oracle or SQL Server stored procedures and move them into Snowflake. For this, you need to learn JavaScript and how it works, which is not easy and becomes a little tricky. If it supports SQL-based procedures, then you can just cut-paste the SQL code, run it, and easily fix small issues."
"The aspect of it that was more complicated was stored procedures. It does not support SQL language-based stored procedures. You have to write in JavaScript. If they supported SQL language and stored procedures, it would make migration from on-prem much simpler. In most cases, if an on-prem solution has stored procedures, they're usually written in SQL. They're not written as what most on-prem DBMS would refer to as an external stored procedure, which is what these feel like to most people because they're written in a language outside of SQL."
"They should improve the reporting tools."
"The solution could improve the user interface and add functionality to the system."
"I am still in the learning stage. It has good security, but it can always be more secure."
"Snowflake could improve if they had an Operational Data Store(ODS) space."
"Snowflake has to build more capabilities because they have only built very few adapters, but they're growing and they're building. They should provide provisions to collect ETL pipeline capabilities, reduce developer work, and make more rapid application development, rather than some customizations. There are very few options, but they are building. I hope they will build ETL rapid application development provisions with more variety."
SAP Business Warehouse is ranked 8th in Cloud Data Warehouse with 25 reviews while Snowflake is ranked 1st in Cloud Data Warehouse with 92 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 "Good usability, good data sharing and elastic compute features, and requires less DBA involvement". SAP Business Warehouse is most compared with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, BigQuery, SAP BW4HANA, Amazon Redshift 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.
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