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."Some of the main features of this solution are that it uses HANA and it has good performance."
"The most valuable feature is that we can transform a huge amount of data and apply business logic as per the requirements."
"The solution's performance is really good. Also, it's easy to operate, easy to administer, and relatively simple to install."
"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 solution is useful for connecting with external systems."
"The product is stable."
"I like that it's quite quick."
"It is a stable solution...The initial setup was easy."
"I like the idea that you can assign roles and responsibilities, limiting access to data."
"A user-friendly and reliable solution."
"The syntax is advanced which reduces the time to write code."
"Data Science capabilities are the most valuable feature."
"We find the data sharing and data marketplace aspects of Snowflake absolutely amazing."
"The querying speed is fast."
"The feature that is really striking is the ability to translate the SQL workloads into the NoSQL version that can be used by Snowflake."
"Data sharing is a good feature. It is a majorly used feature. The elastic compute is another big feature. Separating compute and storage gives you flexibility. It doesn't require much DBA involvement because it doesn't need any performance tuning. We are not really doing any performance tuning, and the entire burden of performance tuning and SQL tuning is on Snowflake. Its usability is very good. I don't need to ramp up any user, and its onboarding is easier. You just onboard the user, and you are done with it. There are simple SQL and UI, and people are able to use this solution easily. Ease of use is a big thing in Snowflake."
"Support could be more reliable."
"If I want to have good reporting, then I have to buy a separate license."
"The product needs to improve with more performance and fewer data layers."
"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."
"There's the complexity in migration from BW to BW/4HANA, especially with data migration."
"Pricing would be a good improvement. A lot of customers think that it's very expensive and especially support is very expensive."
"I cannot integrate it with my other tools. It's not possible to do something in the predictive analysis. Mobile reporting is also not available."
"I don't see SAP actively supporting the solution now...a better support from SAP would be appreciated."
"They need to improve its ETL functionality so that Snowflake becomes an ETL product. Snowpipe can do some pipelines and data ingestion, but as compare to Talend, these functionalities are limited. The ETL feature is not good enough. Therefore, Snowflake can only be used as a database. You can't use it as an ETL tool, which is a limitation. We have spoken to the vendor, and they said they are working on it, but I'm not sure when they will bring it to production."
"They don't have any SLAs in place. It would be better if they did."
"There is room for improvement in Snowflake's integration with Python. We do a lot of SQL programming in Snowflake, but we go to a different tool to program when we have to in Python."
"This solution could be improved by offering machine learning apps."
"Snowflake could improve if they had an Operational Data Store(ODS) space."
"They need to incorporate some basic OLAP capabilities in the backend or at the database level. Currently, it is purely a database. They call it purely a data warehouse for the cloud. Currently, just like any database, we have to calculate all the KPIs in the front-end tools. The same KPIs again need to be calculated in Snowflake. It would be very helpful if they can include some OLAP features. This will bring efficiency because we will be able to create the KPIs within Snowflake itself and then publish them to multiple front-end tools. We won't have to recreate the same in each project. There should be the ability to automate raised queries, which is currently not possible. There should also be something for Exception Aggregation and things like that."
"I don't know about GCP, if they have connected for GCP. If they don't, they should allow for it."
"We would like to have an on-premises deployment option that has the same features, including scalability."
SAP BW4HANA is ranked 8th in Data Warehouse with 36 reviews while Snowflake is ranked 1st in Data Warehouse with 94 reviews. SAP BW4HANA is rated 7.4, while Snowflake 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 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 Business Warehouse, whereas Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Teradata, Vertica and Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics. See our SAP BW4HANA vs. Snowflake report.
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