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 product has efficient performance."
"We can get good visualization and less redundant data."
"It is a stable solution...The initial setup was easy."
"The product is stable."
"The solution is based on SAP ERP, so there's some business content already included. For customers who use SAP ERP, SAP BW4HANA is a good choice for their DW implementation."
"The processes are the most valuable aspect of this solution."
"The ability to instantly pull data is the most valuable feature."
"Some of the main features of this solution are that it uses HANA and it has good performance."
"The feature that is really striking is the ability to translate the SQL workloads into the NoSQL version that can be used by Snowflake."
"As long as you don't need to worry about the storage or cost, this solution would be one of the best ones on the market for scalability purposes."
"It's ultra-fast at handling queries, which is what we find very convenient."
"We find the data sharing and data marketplace aspects of Snowflake absolutely amazing."
"It is a very easy-to-use solution. It is user-friendly, and its setup time is very less."
"This is the advanced version of the cloud version, so it's really a flexible tool. If you have it implemented at home, you can access it from anywhere."
"I like the idea that you can assign roles and responsibilities, limiting access to data."
"I like the fact that we don't need a DBA. It automatically scales stuff."
"I would like more integration."
"I don't see SAP actively supporting the solution now...a better support from SAP would be appreciated."
"Connecting multiple sources is a challenge because you have to go through a lot of different setups."
"The product needs to improve with more performance and fewer data layers."
"The tool is not cloud-compatible."
"The speed of operations could be a little faster."
"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 monitoring for the remodeling feature is very difficult to understand."
"Support needs improvement, as it can take several days before you get some initial support."
"I have heard people having difficulty with the machine learning model, so there may be room for improvement."
"Snowflake could improve migration. It should be made easier. It would be beneficial if it could offer some OLTP features. One of our customers was using Oracle for both data warehousing and OLTP workloads, and they were able to migrate their data warehousing workloads to Snowflake without major issues. However, for some of their OLTP requirements, such as needing a response time of fewer than 10 milliseconds for certain queries, Snowflake is currently unable to provide that."
"If we can have a feature where the results can be moved to different tabs, so that I can compare the results with earlier queries before applying the changes, it would be great."
"If you go with one cloud provider, you can't switch."
"Their UiPath, the workspace area, needs some work."
"In future releases, it can also support full unstructured data."
"I am still in the learning stage. It has good security, but it can always be more secure."
SAP BW4HANA is ranked 7th in Data Warehouse with 34 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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