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Apache Hadoop vs SAP Business Warehouse 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

Apache Hadoop
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (10th)
SAP Business Warehouse
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (15th)
 

Featured Reviews

NR
Financial Advisor at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Reliable performance maintained but requires ongoing management and support
Hadoop was used for years, but there were problems since the people who originally set it up left the firm. The group that owned it later didn't have the technical resources to properly maintain it. Although there was nothing wrong with Hadoop itself, issues arose without proper management and upgrades.
VishnuReddy2 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consulting Enterprise Architect at R2V2.ai
Have encountered complexity with programming language while working on large-scale data integration and have experienced improved governance and reporting
The only complexity I find with the product is the programming language; people find it harder, but once you know the language, it's not that difficult. Regarding the future of SAP Business Warehouse, I would to see added features that simplify the product very well now. They are coming up with a terminology called SAP BDC where they are consolidating their tools, SAP Data Sphere for integration and SAP BW for the ETL and warehousing parts, and SAP Analytics Cloud. They are packaging these three features and calling it Business Data Cloud; they are fully coming on the cloud. We have to wait and watch; they have been speaking about BW/4HANA for quite some time now, but the customers or clients I work with are not finding great interest and it was seen as a candidate for evaluation. I have seen people looking at the latest technologies who are already on cloud who started building from scratch on cloud, such as Snowflake or Databricks, which can process very huge amounts of data and also address unstructured data, where SAP lags behind in cases where there is a need to bring in unstructured data. I have worked with SAP Data Intelligence, which earlier used to be called SAP Data Hub. The unstructured data is not greatly handled in SAP at this point in time.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The performance is pretty good."
"The most valuable thing about this program for us is that it is very powerful and very cheap."
"Hadoop is more for analytical processing, and while other databases claim to have a distributor, Hadoop is far better in that regard and is excellent compared to other options."
"Apache Hadoop is crucial in projects that save and retrieve data daily. Its valuable features are scalability and stability. It is easy to integrate with the existing infrastructure."
"It is a file system for data collection. There are nodes in this cluster that contain all the information, directories, and other files. The nodes are based on the MySQL database."
"Hadoop has also made it feasible to have all the data available in one area."
"Hadoop is good for analytics and some reporting requirements."
"As compared to Hive on MapReduce, Impala on MPP returns results of SQL queries in a fairly short amount of time, and is relatively fast when reading data into other platforms like R (for further data analysis) or QlikView (for data visualisation)."
"The customer support is wonderful. If your technical team is stuck somewhere, they are there to help."
"The Real-time InfoCube is quite useful in terms of getting information fast when we need it."
"We switched to SAP because the solution is more comfortable to work with."
"We are currently in a basic stage of analytics and the first goal we have is to make sure the numbers are correct. BW has some features that help you to build factors and ETL in such a way that it's easy to get to correct responses. That's the number one condition that you have to have in an analytic solution."
"Now, because of the HANA integration, the hard disk and RAM are together, and because of that, the output is very quick and very fast actually."
"The most valuable feature of SAP Business Warehouse is its hybrid functionality, allowing users to leverage both SQL-based data warehouse capabilities from HANA and feature-based data warehousing from BW."
"The solution has functionality that makes it easy for end-users to readily extract data directly from Business Warehouse into Excel and carry on their analysis on their own."
"What I like most about SAP Business Warehouse is that it's a seamless integration platform."
 

Cons

"In general, stability can be a challenge."
"The product's availability of comprehensive training materials could be improved for faster onboarding and skill development among team members."
"The solution needs a better tutorial."
"It requires a great deal of learning curve to understand. The overall Hadoop ecosystem has a large number of sub-products. There is ZooKeeper, and there are a whole lot of other things that are connected. In many cases, their functionalities are overlapping, and for a newcomer or our clients, it is very difficult to decide which of them to buy and which of them they don't really need. They require a consulting organization for it, which is good for organizations such as ours because that's what we do, but it is not easy for the end customers to gain so much knowledge and optimally use it."
"Apache Hadoop's real-time data processing is weak and is not enough to satisfy our customers, so we may have to pick other products."
"The solution is not easy to use. The solution should be easy to use and suitable for almost any case connected with the use of big data or working with large amounts of data."
"It requires a great deal of learning curve to understand."
"I rate it an eight out of 10. It's huge, complex, slow."
"Integration with SAP Business Warehouse's ETL tools is not straightforward."
"The solution could offer better connectivity with other databases."
"The problem with BW, and the factor that differentiated it from the original BW, is that you only get limited functionality with your runtime license. So, you have to pay extra for extracting data."
"More integration with Microsoft Office products (not just Excel) would be helpful."
"The way the data is stored is kind of rigid in SAP BW as a product. It could be more flexible so that when we are designing a solution, we can design our own data structures and try to improve performance."
"When some things go wrong, it becomes extremely unreliable."
"So far, the initial setup process in our company has not been easy enough for us to understand."
"What I'd like improved in SAP Business Warehouse is its setup. It could be more flexible, and it could be a configuration-based setup."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If my company can use the cloud version of Apache Hadoop, particularly the cloud storage feature, it would be easier and would cost less because an on-premises deployment has a higher cost during storage, for example, though I don't know exactly how much Apache Hadoop costs."
"The product is open-source, but some associated licensing fees depend on the subscription level."
"The price could be better. Hortonworks no longer exists, and Cloudera killed the free version of Hadoop."
"It's reasonable, but there's room for improvement in cost-effectiveness."
"The price of Apache Hadoop could be less expensive."
"For any big enterprise the costs can be handled, and it is suitable for big enterprises because the scale of data is large. For medium and small enterprises, the tool is on the high-price side."
"​There are no licensing costs involved, hence money is saved on the software infrastructure​."
"This is a low cost and powerful solution."
"It's quite pricey. SAP changed its pricing policy, so they give you one engine and then you have to buy everything next to it, like MSS, the BPC licenses, and everything else."
"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive."
"The licensing cost for SAP Business Warehouse depends on your revenue. Its licensing structure is a little bit complicated. The more your revenue is, the higher the price, but SAP does have different pricing structures for various companies. For small businesses, licensing isn't based on revenue, but for big companies, it's revenue-based. There's some agreement regarding pricing for huge companies, so it's different, and SAP Business Warehouse pricing isn't fixed. On a scale of one to ten, I'm rating the licensing cost for SAP Business Warehouse as five because it's very high. As your revenue grows, your licensing cost also increases, so you have to factor that in when calculating your cost."
"The license for SAP Business Warehouse is paid yearly, and there's no extra cost in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"It's moderately expensive, but definitely has its branding and price value for it."
"SAP Business Warehouse licensing is a bit expensive compared to other products in the market."
"I would not recommend it to small-scale companies. The price is too much."
"The solution is quite expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
24%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Construction Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Manufacturing Company
13%
Construction Company
11%
Healthcare Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business14
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise22
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Apache Hadoop?
The product is open-source, but some associated licensing fees depend on the subscription level. While it might be free for students, organizations typically need to pay for their subscriptions. Th...
What needs improvement with Apache Hadoop?
The problem with Apache Hadoop arose when the guys that originally set it up left the firm, and the group that later owned it didn't have enough technical resources to properly maintain it. This wa...
What is your primary use case for Apache Hadoop?
My use cases for Apache Hadoop include the setups I completed, connecting to the database, and analyzing the incidences, making it a good tool for Hadoop. Apache Hadoop helps us analyze all of the ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP Business Warehouse?
The pricing for SAP Business Warehouse is on the expensive side. I am not sure about the current costing model as such. In my experience on cloud, I did not use BW HANA Cloud. I used the cloud prod...
What needs improvement with SAP Business Warehouse?
The only complexity I find with the product is the programming language; people find it harder, but once you know the language, it's not that difficult. Regarding the future of SAP Business Warehou...
What is your primary use case for SAP Business Warehouse?
I am using SAP Business Warehouse in my organization for data warehousing as well as an ETL tool. Integration with SAP Business Warehouse's ETL tools is not straightforward. Integration with SAP ER...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Amazon, Adobe, eBay, Facebook, Google, Hulu, IBM, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Spotify, AOL, Twitter, University of Maryland, Yahoo!, Cornell University Web Lab
Medtronic, Cirque du Soleil, Antarc, B&G Manufacturing, EarlySense, eBay, Ferrero, James Austin Company, Lenovo, Sagem, RAK Ceramics, Vodafone
Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Teradata, Oracle and others in Data Warehouse. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.