We performed a comparison between Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics and SAP BW4HANA 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 best thing about it is that it has integration at multiple places. It can talk to more than 90 types of data sources, which is one good thing about it."
"The whole solution is interesting for us."
"The most advantageous aspect of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is its simplified data transformation process compared to traditional databases. This makes data cleansing and transformation more manageable and straightforward, which we appreciate. It is much easier to build as well."
"We've had a good experience with technical support in general."
"One of the most valuable features of this solution is its ability to integrate well with other services offered by Azure."
"Very interactive and provides flexibility."
"The solution's best feature is its predictive analytics."
"It's user-friendly and has a good dashboard."
"The most valuable feature is that we can transform a huge amount of data and apply business logic as per the requirements."
"It is a stable solution...The initial setup was easy."
"You can do hierarchical alert slicing and dicing out-of-box, which is not available in other solutions. I haven't come across that in Oracle or any other software provider."
"The UI is completely new, beautiful, and user-friendly. There are some other helpful features like global filters and advanced tools. We can perform custom calculations easily From a technical perspective, the performance has been enhanced and optimized for a limited number of flows. The content settings are more advanced, and there are so many other features that I can't name them all."
"The solution seamlessly integrates with SAP products."
"The product is stable."
"We like that it is an SAP product, so we can easily connect with the SAP ERP system."
"I like the reporting features of the solution."
"While the solution is flexible, sometimes this works against the user."
"More integration is needed to improve the product for the future."
"There may be some challenges in terms of connecting with Virtual Networks (VNETs) to Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics."
"The configuration for things like high-availability could be more user-friendly for non-technical users."
"I would like to see them provide the ingestion of images."
"The major challenge that we're seeing with Azure Synapse is around security concerns. The way it is working right now, it has Managed VNet by Microsoft option, similar to the implementation of Azure Databricks, which may pose a concern for financial institutions. For managed environments, the banks have very strict policies around data being onboarded to those environments. For some confidential applications, the banks have the policy to encrypt it with their own key, so it is sort of like Bring Your Own Key, but it is not possible to manage the resources with Microsoft or Databricks, which is probably the major challenge with Azure Synapse. There should be more compatibility with SQL Server. It should be easier to migrate solutions between different environments because right now, it is not really competitive. It is not like you can go and install SQL Database in some other environment. You will have to go through some migration projects, which probably is one of the major showstoppers for any bank. When they consider Synapse, they not only consider the investment in the actual service; they also consider the cost of the migration process. When you scale out or scale down your system, it becomes unavailable for a few minutes. Because it is a data warehouse environment, it is not such a huge deal, but it would be great if they can improve it so that the platform is available during the change of configuration."
"It would be beneficial to take the top vendors and identify some kind of straightforward action to work with them. Instead of having to employ a separate vendor tool to be able to move this, it would be nice to be able to go through Microsoft."
"I would like to see more ready-to-use products from Synapse. Right now, everything seems a bit futuristic without much modern use."
"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."
"I don't see SAP actively supporting the solution now...a better support from SAP would be appreciated."
"The UI is not user-friendly."
"The product needs to improve with more performance and fewer data layers."
"Not a ten because it's expensive and its ecosystem is not very open."
"In the next release, I would like to see their BI component introduced with a mobile version, as it is not currently present."
"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."
"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."
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Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is ranked 2nd in Cloud Data Warehouse with 86 reviews while SAP BW4HANA is ranked 8th in Data Warehouse with 37 reviews. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is rated 7.8, while SAP BW4HANA is rated 7.4. The top reviewer of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics writes "No competitors provide the entire solution to one place ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SAP BW4HANA writes "Performs all necessary data warehouse tasks and offers additional functionalities". Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is most compared with Azure Data Factory, Snowflake, Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, Teradata and Amazon Redshift, whereas SAP BW4HANA is most compared with Snowflake, SAP HANA, Amazon Redshift, SQL Server and SAP Business Warehouse. See our Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. SAP BW4HANA report.
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