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 aspect of this solution is that the infrastructure is easy to understand."
"We like that it is an SAP product, so we can easily connect with the SAP ERP system."
"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."
"The product has efficient performance."
"Its direct approach is the most valuable. You get more real time and capabilities than BW."
"The solution is easier to maintain than traditional SAP products."
"It's quite scalable."
"Provides a great analytics engine with all the capabilities."
"It's user-friendly. It's SQL-driven. The fact that business can also go to this application and query because they know SQL is the biggest factor."
"Snowflake's most valuable features are data enrichment and flattening."
"It is a highly scalable solution. There is no limit on storage or computing."
"The distributed architecture of Snowflake has the capacity to process huge datasets faster and allows us to scale up and down according to our needs."
"A user-friendly and reliable solution."
"The adaptation to development languages is most valuable. Our developers can SQL code or something else. It has been convenient in that regard."
"All the people who are working with Snowflake are extremely happy with it because it is designed from a data-warehousing point of view, not the other way around. You have a database and then you tweak it and then it becomes a data warehouse."
"I like the idea that you can assign roles and responsibilities, limiting access to data."
"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."
"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."
"The dashboard should be simplified and made easier for exploration and decision making."
"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."
"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."
"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 speed of operations could be a little faster."
"The tool is not easy to use for an end user."
"It needs a bit more rigor and governance, which is something you don't get with newer tools. This makes it less enterprise scalable. Its governance and structure can be enhanced, which would really be valuable. I would like to see some kind of prebuilt functionality in terms of having almost like a pre-built data warehouse. A functionality for generating automated kind of pieces would be good."
"Maybe there could be some more connectors to other systems, but this is what they are constantly developing anyway."
"I am still in the learning stage. It has good security, but it can always be more secure."
"The pricing of the solution should be much easier to calculate or find by yourself."
"They do have a native connector to connect with integration tools for loading data, but it would be much better to have the functionality built-in."
"I would like to see a client version of the GUI."
"The solution should offer an on-premises version also. We have some requirements where we would prefer to use it as a template."
"There are some challenges with loading unstructured data and integrating some message queues or brokers. In one project, we had a problem connecting to one of the message queues and we had to take a different route altogether on Microsoft Azure."
SAP BW4HANA is ranked 7th in Data Warehouse with 33 reviews while Snowflake is ranked 1st in Data Warehouse with 92 reviews. SAP BW4HANA is rated 7.4, while Snowflake is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of SAP BW4HANA writes "An easy-to-operate and administer tool that needs to consider revising its existing licensing cost". 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, Amazon Redshift, SAP HANA, SQL Server and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, whereas Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Teradata, Vertica and Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse. See our SAP BW4HANA vs. Snowflake report.
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