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."We can get good visualization and less redundant data."
"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."
"It is a very stable solution."
"The solution is easier to maintain than traditional SAP products."
"Its direct approach is the most valuable. You get more real time and capabilities than BW."
"We benefited from BW/4HANA's ability to utilize predefined content inside. We didn't need to start from scratch."
"The most valuable aspect of this solution is that the infrastructure is easy to understand."
"The ability to instantly pull data is the most valuable feature."
"Data Science capabilities are the most valuable feature."
"The pricing is reasonable and matches the rest of the market."
"Scaling is a big plus point of Snowflake."
"The tool is very easy to use. The solution’s desktop features are also very easy to use. Also, the product’s SQL-based connectivity is also good. It can connect with any tool."
"Snowflake has a variety of other ETL provisions that they provide. You can use your own ETL pipeline. Additionally, they provide adapters, and they are always evolving, it is a well-developed solution."
"Very easy to use and easy to query."
"The solution is easy to use."
"The snapshot feature is good, the rollback feature is good and the interface is user-friendly."
"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."
"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 tool is not easy to use for an end user."
"I would like more integration."
"Connecting multiple sources is a challenge because you have to go through a lot of different setups."
"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."
"Price wise, this solution is on the higher side."
"If I want to have good reporting, then I have to buy a separate license."
"If they could bring in some tools for data integration, it would be really great."
"These aren't as crucial, but there are common errors sometimes where the database is down, or a table is nullified and a new table is added and you are not given access to that. With those errors, you don't have permissions."
"Its pricing or affordability is one of the big challenges. Pricing was the only thing that we didn't like about Snowflake. In terms of technical features, it is a complete solution."
"The design of the product is easily misunderstood."
"Snowflake has support for stored procedures, but it is not that powerful."
"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."
"I would like to see a client version of the GUI."
"An additional feature I'd like to see is called materialized views, which can speed up some run times. I'd like it to be able to be used where you can have multiple tables inside them; materialized view. That would be nice. As well as being able to run cursors, to be able to do some bulk updates and some more advanced querying, table building on the fly."
SAP BW4HANA is ranked 8th in Data Warehouse with 37 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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