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Amazon Redshift vs SAP BW4HANA comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Redshift
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
67
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (5th)
SAP BW4HANA
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
42
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (9th)
 

Featured Reviews

Ved Prakash Yadav - PeerSpot reviewer
Works as a data warehouse system and collects data from different sources
In terms of improvement, I believe Amazon Redshift could work on reducing its costs, as they tend to increase significantly. Additionally, there are occasional issues with nodes going down, which can be problematic. We often encounter issues like someone dropping a column or changing the order of columns, which can cause synchronization problems when pushing data through our pipeline. It's a minor issue, but it can be annoying.
Csaba Grünblatt - PeerSpot reviewer
Performs all necessary data warehouse tasks and offers additional functionalities
SAP BW4HANA improved data reporting processes significantly. Performance on HANA database is good. Well-built data models ensure consistent and fast reporting. Reusable models enhance efficiency, even for SaaS services. In-memory computing, especially since HANA, has greatly improved performance in data analysis tasks. It eliminates the need for complex optimizations like creating indexes or aggregates. Queries that once took minutes now run in seconds, enabling real-time reporting, especially for SAP ECC on HANA. SAP BW4HANA's integration capabilities are streamlined with a simplified architecture and more virtual layers. You can directly load data into optimized layers, reducing the need for extra storage. The introduction of Open ODS Views allows for additional logic and master data inclusion, making integration faster and simpler. The learning curve for SAP BW4HANA is much faster now compared to ten years ago, thanks to abundant free resources like documentation, videos, blogs, and learning journeys provided by SAP. It is simpler to learn with these resources available compared to the past when you had to attend courses and rely on books. I would recommend SAP BW4HANA to users looking to implement it, especially if they want to keep their systems on-premise and already have SAP systems. Those with BW on HANA have two choices: BW4HANA or DataSphere, depending on their cloud strategy. If they are advanced in their cloud strategy and want to migrate off-premise, DataSphere is a good choice. However, for a robust solution on-premise or in a private cloud, BW4HANA is an excellent option. Overall, I would rate BW4HANA as a nine out of ten. It performs all necessary data warehouse tasks and offers additional functionalities. We use it traditionally, with complex transformations and models but with less emphasis on real-time processing and third-party sources.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The most valuable feature is that the solution is fully embedded in the AWS stack."
"The valuable features are performance, data compression, and scalability."
"The product offers good support for the data lake."
"Amazon Redshift offers a relatively flexible structure...I rate the technical support a nine out of ten."
"The product is relatively easy to use because there is no indexing and no partitions."
"It is quite simple to use and there are no issues with creating the tables."
"The solution has very competitive pricing."
"The processing of data is very fast."
"It is a stable solution."
"It is a very stable solution."
"It can calculate data in detail. Before we could not calculate financial documents and accountant documents in detail, we could not do it at a document level but now we can. This is the most important feature. It also has predictive analysis memory."
"The product has efficient performance."
"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."
"Technology-wise, it is a very robust tool."
"Provides a great analytics engine with all the capabilities."
"The solution is useful for connecting with external systems."
 

Cons

"There is some missing functionality and sometimes it's so difficult to work in. We need to convert these functionalities using VACUUM inside Amazon Redshift and then it causes some complexity."
"Pricing is one of the things that it could improve. It should be more competitive."
"There are too many limitations with respect to concurrency."
"We are using third-party tools to integrate Amazon Redshift, they should create their own interface on their own for it to be easily connected on the AWS itself."
"It takes a lot of time to ingest and update the data."
"The technical support should be better in terms of their knowledge, and they should be more customer-friendly."
"The OLAP slide and dice features need to be improved."
"They should provide a better way to work with interim data in a structured way than to store it in parquet files locally."
"Connecting multiple sources is a challenge because you have to go through a lot of different setups."
"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 solution is not scalable. It does not have a data streaming feature as well."
"I don't see SAP actively supporting the solution now...a better support from SAP would be appreciated."
"The solution is not easy to implement. It requires a lot of learning at the beginning."
"The UI is not user-friendly."
"Price wise, this solution is on the higher side."
"There should be a direct pipeline from Azure to SAP."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is available at a mid-range price compared to other vendors."
"The solution has very competitive pricing."
"The part that I like best is that you only pay for what you are using."
"On a scale of one to ten, where one is a low price and ten is a high price, I rate the pricing a seven."
"Pricing for Amazon Redshift is reasonable, though it could be somewhat higher than other solutions, such as Azure. Still, when you base your comparison on the services offered and the pricing, it's the most reasonable versus its competitors, such as RDS."
"Per hour pricing is helpful to keep the costs of a pilot down, but long-term retention is expensive."
"Amazon Redshift is an expensive solution. Larger organizations can afford this solution, but smaller businesses would struggle to afford it."
"At the moment, pricing is a little bit on the higher side, although it depends on the size of the company."
"The cost and licensing depends on how the customer is going to use the solution."
"Price wise, this solution is on the higher side."
"We have a broad licensing arrangement, which is expensive but worth it for sizeable businesses."
"We started as early birds from the SAP side. We got this entire suite for free. I cannot really talk about the price because we didn't have to pay anything."
"It is an expensive product."
"For the on-premises version of the product, the solution offers a perpetual-based licensing model to its users. In general, SAP offers a monthly subscription-based licensing model to its users."
"SAP BW/4HANA is expensive."
"The cost of ownership is higher. It's resource-intensive, and naturally, that increases costs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
64%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
3%
Manufacturing Company
18%
Computer Software Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Energy/Utilities Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

How does Amazon Redshift compare with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics?
Amazon Redshift is very fast, has a very good response time, and is very user-friendly. The initial setup is very straightforward. This solution can merge and integrate well with many different dat...
What do you like most about Amazon Redshift?
The tool's most valuable feature is its parallel processing capability. It can handle massive amounts of data, even when pushing hundreds of terabytes, and its scaling capabilities are good.
What do you like most about SAP BW4HANA?
One significant advantage of SAP BW/4HANA is the direct integration with the SAP HANA database, providing seamless access to real-time analytics. Additionally, it enables real-time data integrati...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP BW4HANA?
We have a broad licensing arrangement, which is expensive but worth it for sizeable businesses.
What needs improvement with SAP BW4HANA?
The interface could be more user-friendly, as we often need to do low-level coding to get things done.
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
SAP BW/4HANA
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Liberty Mutual Insurance, 4Cite Marketing, BrandVerity, DNA Plc, Sirocco Systems, Gainsight, Blue 449
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Redshift vs. SAP BW4HANA and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
832,138 professionals have used our research since 2012.