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 processes are the most valuable aspect of this solution."
"The most valuable feature is that we can transform a huge amount of data and apply business logic as per the requirements."
"SAP BW4HANA aids in managing data from ER to front-end analysis, contributes to ROI, and fosters business growth understanding. I like that the solution breaks down components to a very granular level, allowing for customization and implementation based on specific requirements. The solution is stable. The solution is scalable."
"Out of the box, this solution has a lot of standard features."
"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."
"Some of the main features of this solution are that it uses HANA and it has good performance."
"It's quite scalable."
"The most valuable aspect of this solution is that the infrastructure is easy to understand."
"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."
"Snowflake has three great features: Snowpiping is proving to be very valuable, Time Travel is excellent, and Snowpipes are another great functionality the solution has made available."
"The solution is easy to use."
"Great scalability and near zero maintenance."
"Snowflake's most valuable features are data enrichment and flattening."
"The most efficient way for real-time dashboards or analytical business intelligence reports to be sent to the customer."
"Once you have finished your designs they can be easily imported to Snowflake and the information can be readily accessed without an IT expert."
"The syntax is advanced which reduces the time to write code."
"Other competitors provide better solutions that are more up to date with current technology."
"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 speed of operations could be a little faster."
"The product needs to improve with more performance and fewer data layers."
"The monitoring for the remodeling feature is very difficult to understand."
"The dashboard should be simplified and made easier for exploration and decision making."
"It's complicated to use. You need to spend a lot of time learning about it. The interface could be improved. It's not intuitive to build a data model and use their ETL tools."
"There are a lot of features that they need to come up with. A lot of functions are missing in Snowflake, so we have to find a workaround for those. For example, OUTER APPLY is a basic function in SQL Server, but it is not there in Snowflake. So, you have to write complex code for it."
"In a future release we would like to have a link which would allow us to connect to an external database and create certain views in your own database. This is because it is becoming hard for us to compare the data between multiple sources."
"There is a scope for improvement. They don't currently support integration with some of the Azure and AWS native services. It would be good if they can enhance their product to integrate with these services."
"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."
"These days, they are pushing users towards the GUI or graphical version. However, I am more familiar with the classic version. I'd like to continue to work with it using the older approach."
"More data governance and access control features would be a welcome addition."
"This solution could be improved by offering machine learning apps."
"The pricing of the solution should be much easier to calculate or find by yourself."
SAP BW4HANA is ranked 7th in Data Warehouse with 36 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, SAP HANA, Amazon Redshift, SQL Server and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, whereas Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Teradata, Vertica and Oracle Exadata. See our SAP BW4HANA vs. Snowflake report.
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