We performed a comparison between SAP BW4HANA and SQL Server based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Oracle, Teradata and others in Data Warehouse."The solution is easier to maintain than traditional SAP products."
"The solution seamlessly integrates with SAP products."
"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 ability to instantly pull data is the most valuable feature."
"The solution is useful for connecting with external systems."
"Its direct approach is the most valuable. You get more real time and capabilities than BW."
"The most valuable feature is the dashboard."
"I like that it's quite quick."
"The solution is easy to use and provides similar features to other competitors."
"The most valuable feature would most likely be querying. We query a lot, we use a lot of stored procedures. As for other features, such as replication and all other more fancy features we don't use them the most. I do not know, but perhaps the DBAs would be the best people who know of the features that they use, but as far as how I use it, it's just for querying and running stored procedures. We use the bare minimum features."
"SQL Server's performance is fine."
"I like the availability group functionality. We are setting up more clusters using availability groups. The enterprise licensing or Software Assurance makes it a little bit cheaper as well. It is nice to have that read-only copy for reporting and everything else."
"For me, the initial setup is very easy as I have years of experience with the product."
"It is one of the most stable relational databases out there."
"can extract data from the server and store it in a local data source for BI purposes."
"It's easy to use and fairly intuitive. I do development and data analysis, so we do a lot of work with SSIS and SQL Job Scheduler. Deploying new databases is very simple with things like BACPAC."
"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."
"The dashboard should be simplified and made easier for exploration and decision making."
"The monitoring for the remodeling feature is very difficult to understand."
"The UI is not user-friendly."
"The product needs to improve with more performance and fewer data layers."
"The solution does occasionally get a few bugs, but this is typical for any product."
"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."
"Pricing would be a good improvement. A lot of customers think that it's very expensive and especially support is very expensive."
"I would like to see improvements made to the stability of SQL Server, as well as more analytics requirements."
"The price could be better. It costs a lot, and competing databases like Postgres are free."
"I would like to see the performance improved. Migrating should be easier and the scalability needs improvement."
"I would like the SQL Server to be able to provide cloud support. We use the solution with a Korean provider supporting only MySQL rather than Microsoft SQL Server, which would be preferable and cheaper. This would prevent us from having to pay for troubleshooting and hosting the server."
"Security is an area that can be improved."
"Their support could be better. There should be more visibility on the progress of the ticket, and their last line of support should be more knowledgeable. Other than that, we have nothing to complain about."
"It could be more stable."
"As SQL server could not support the number of connections we desired, we were forced to go with Oracle."
SAP BW4HANA is ranked 8th in Data Warehouse with 36 reviews while SQL Server is ranked 1st in Relational Databases Tools with 260 reviews. SAP BW4HANA is rated 7.4, while SQL Server is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of SAP BW4HANA writes "Performs all necessary data warehouse tasks and offers additional functionalities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SQL Server writes "Easy to use and provides good speed and data recovery". SAP BW4HANA is most compared with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, Snowflake, SAP HANA, Amazon Redshift and SAP Business Warehouse, whereas SQL Server is most compared with MariaDB, SAP HANA, Oracle Database, LocalDB and IBM Db2 Database.
We monitor all Data Warehouse reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
