We performed a comparison between SAP BW4HANA and SAP IQ 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."It's quite scalable."
"The ability to instantly pull data is the most valuable feature."
"The solution is easier to maintain than traditional SAP products."
"It is a stable solution...The initial setup was easy."
"We benefited from BW/4HANA's ability to utilize predefined content inside. We didn't need to start from scratch."
"It is a stable solution...It is a scalable solution."
"The product has efficient performance."
"The most valuable aspect of this solution is that the infrastructure is easy to understand."
"The primary benefit of SAP IQ is its ability to limit the expansion of the costly SAP HANA database, which has limited storage capacity. This necessitates a form of data management that involves moving data from SAP HANA to SAP NLS, which is essentially archiving. This allows us to retain access to the data via a link whenever it is required."
"The column-based technologies (basically all the database for ITP) are used for SAP IQ. It is used as a column-based solution."
"It is very robust for ad hoc DW queries and its columnar compression is unique and valuable."
"Valuable features for us include the compression, speed, fast response time, and easy object maintenance."
"Unbeatable speed and compression with a colummn-structured relational database."
"Columnar storage allows high compression, high load rates and high query performance."
"Challenges arise with real-time client requirements when clients are accustomed to Microsoft Excel's extensive features for data analysis. They expect similar flexibility and customization in the solution, particularly regarding headers displaying keys and descriptions or just keys. Achieving this level of customization can be challenging, and it's an area that may need improvement."
"Pricing would be a good improvement. A lot of customers think that it's very expensive and especially support is very expensive."
"It takes too long to escalate problems from the first level of support."
"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."
"The product needs to improve with more performance and fewer data layers."
"The monitoring for the remodeling feature is very difficult to understand."
"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."
"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 organization who owns the product does not support it well and appears not to be doing significant development for the future."
"The solution works best when combined with other SAP solutions. If the environment has other systems other options might be better."
"The room for improvement would be the marketing of the product, because this product is much better than advertised."
"Multiplex is very problematic. There are consistency problems in the metadata, meaning it is possible to lose metadata consistency. You should make sure you have healthy backups."
"Concurrency and functional error messaging."
"I think the universe should be part of the Sybase IQ tool set."
SAP BW4HANA is ranked 7th in Data Warehouse with 34 reviews while SAP IQ is ranked 16th in Data Warehouse with 17 reviews. SAP BW4HANA is rated 7.4, while SAP IQ is rated 8.0. 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 SAP IQ writes "Easy to use, highly stable, but integration could improve". SAP BW4HANA is most compared with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, SAP HANA and Apache Hadoop, whereas SAP IQ is most compared with Snowflake, SAP HANA, SQL Server, Apache Hadoop and SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise. See our SAP BW4HANA vs. SAP IQ report.
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