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BigQuery vs SAP Business Warehouse comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

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

BigQuery
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
44
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SAP Business Warehouse
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
15th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of BigQuery is 7.9%, up from 6.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Business Warehouse is 2.4%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
BigQuery7.9%
SAP Business Warehouse2.4%
Other89.7%
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

Mikah Sellers - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal at Sgt Suds
Has supported detailed policy and education analysis with low-code data exploration
I do not use AWS as my main cloud provider within the company and am not currently using it with AWS. My company did not buy it through the AWS Marketplace as I'm the founder of the company. I do not use BigQuery's integration with Google Analytics for custom behavior analysis. I have not utilized the geospatial analysis capabilities with BigQuery as I'm doing mostly human capital work, so geospatial wouldn't make sense. I would rate their service on a scale of one to 10 for Google as ten. I would rate BigQuery as nine out of 10. My experience with the pricing for BigQuery was through a grant from Google. Their pricing is fairly priced and pretty comparable to Microsoft's offering. I haven't had direct experience, but I did look at the pricing of the Microsoft offering and it's pretty similar. I do not deal with Google AI tools such as Vertex.
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 main thing I like about BigQuery is storage. We did an on-premise BigQuery migration with trillions of records. Usually, we have to deal with insufficient storage on-premises, but in BigQuery, we don't get that because it's like cloud storage, and we can have any number of records. That is one advantage. The next major advantage is the column length. We have some limits on column length on-premises, like 10,000, and we have to design it based on that. However, with BigQuery, we don't need to design the column length at all. It will expand or shrink based on the records it's getting. I can give you a real-life example based on our migration from on-premises to GCP. There was a dimension table with a general number of records, and when we queried that on-premises, like in Apache Spark or Teradata, it took around half an hour to get those records. In BigQuery, it was instant. As it's very fast, you can get it in two or three minutes. That was very helpful for our engineers. Usually, we have to run a query on-premises and go for a break while waiting for that query to give us the results. It's not the case with BigQuery because it instantly provides results when we run it. So, that makes the work fast, it helps a lot, and it helps save a lot of time. It also has a reasonable performance rate and smart tuning. Suppose we need to perform some joins, BigQuery has a smart tuning option, and it'll tune itself and tell us the best way a query can be done in the backend. To be frank, the performance, reliability, and everything else have improved, even the downtime. Usually, on-premise servers have some downtime, but as BigQuery is multiregional, we have storage in three different locations. So, downtime is also not getting impacted. For example, if the Atlantic ocean location has some downtime, or the server is down, we can use data that is stored in Africa or somewhere else. We have three or four storage locations, and that's the main advantage."
"The features I have found most valuable in BigQuery include the query cache, which is good and scales well; it handles huge amounts of data quite well, and the multi-regions feature works well."
"There are some performance features like partitioning, which you can do based on an integer, and it improves the performance a lot."
"The solution's reporting, dashboard, and out-of-the-box capabilities match exactly our requirements."
"One of the most significant advantages lies in the decoupling of storage and compute which allows to independently scale storage and compute resources, with the added benefit of extremely cost-effective storage akin to object storage solutions."
"It's a stable, reliable solution."
"BigQuery is similar to Snowflake in the way it manages data analytics and completely decouples storage from compute, offering a 100% managed, infrastructure-free solution where you can build an end-to-end data platform directly from a browser console."
"BigQuery is a powerful tool for managing and analyzing large datasets. The versatility of BigQuery extends to its compatibility with external data visualization tools like Power BI and Tableau. This means you not only get query results but can also seamlessly integrate and visualize your data for better insights."
"The most useful feature has been he ability to feed data into multiple systems in various formats."
"My advice would be if you have a data block and if you really want a big solution on the reporting side of it with slicing and dicing, definitely go ahead with BW when it comes to SAP related data."
"With the technical support, the response has been pretty good from the SAP side."
"I like that it integrates to open-source."
"Technical support is very good, and we were very satisfied with their level of support when we needed it."
"Getting high volume data is most valuable for us; it is really fast and it has great integration with SAP ERP or a non-SAP system."
"The product is very stable."
"What I like most about SAP Business Warehouse is that it's a seamless integration platform. A valuable feature in the tool is the monitoring alert that makes you aware of what process chain has failed. There's no manual monitoring required if you have configured an alert system, so the process chain can run in the background, and you can get alerts about it. The functionalities I find good in SAP Business Warehouse are alerting and monitoring. If you have configured the tool and have integrated it with SAP Solution Manager, then it's a good product to use."
 

Cons

"We'd like to see more local data residency."
"With other columnar databases like Snowflake, you can actually increase your VM size or increase your machine size, and you can buy more memory and it will start working faster, but that's not available in BigQuery. You have to actually open a ticket and then follow it up with Google support."
"There is a limitation when copying data directly from BigQuery; it only supports up to ten MB when copying data to the clipboard."
"The price could be better. Compared to competing solutions, BigQuery is expensive."
"The process of migrating from Datastore to BigQuery should be improved."
"To be very specific, here in the Middle East, I'm based out of the UAE, and Google has a very narrow footprint, a very limited footprint here in the region."
"It would be beneficial if BigQuery could be made more affordable."
"There are areas that could be improved with BigQuery, such as more bolt-on capabilities and the ability to use more bolt-ons for APIs."
"Areas for improvement in SAP Business Warehouse include enhancing scheduling and monitoring tools, as well as improving communication about hidden features to make them more accessible to users."
"It's a product that is at the end of life so they will not improve it anymore."
"I would for sure like to see a different end solution in order to read the data and attract internal users."
"One of our requirements is the ability to easily get answers regarding trends and exceptions. In BW, it is not that easy to get such information. I expect better trend and exception detection, better pattern detection."
"There are a lot of things that could be improved especially in terms of data cleansing, data management, data lineage, etc. The solution needs to offer more flexibility in terms of formulas and the query designer."
"Integration with SAP Business Warehouse's ETL tools is not straightforward."
"A few things which are missing include the visualization of reports. That's where your costs and licensing become heavy. When it comes to this database compared Microsoft Warehouse, it's an expensive solution."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The platform is inexpensive."
"The price could be better. Usually, you need to buy the license for a year. Whenever you want more, you can subscribe to it, and you can use it. Otherwise, you can terminate the license. You can use it daily or monthly, and we use it based on a project's requirements."
"The tool has competitive pricing."
"The pricing is good and there are no additional costs involved."
"The pricing is adaptable, ensuring that organizations can tailor their usage and costs based on their specific requirements and configurations within the Google Cloud Platform."
"I have tried my own setup using my Gmail ID, and I think it had a $300 limit for free for a new user. That's what Google is offering, and we can register and create a project."
"The pricing appears to be competitive for the intended usage scenarios we have in mind."
"We are above the free threshold, so we are paying around 40 euros per month for BigQuery."
"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive."
"The solution is quite 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."
"I would not recommend it to small-scale companies. The price is too much."
"SAP Business Warehouse licensing is a bit expensive compared to other products in the market."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
16%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Media Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
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 Business15
Midsize Enterprise10
Large Enterprise19
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BigQuery?
I believe the cost of BigQuery is competitive versus the alternatives in the market, but it can become expensive if the tool is not used properly. It is on a per-consumption basis, the billing, so ...
What needs improvement with BigQuery?
The queries that BigQuery provides are not optimized at a greater level. For simple tasks it is good, but if I want to write complex analyzing queries, it doesn't give the queries up to the mark, s...
What is your primary use case for BigQuery?
My main use case for BigQuery is the analysis of our data, creating dashboards from large datasets, and querying the databases that we have, including both structured and unstructured data imported...
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...
 

Also Known As

BQ
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
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 BigQuery vs. SAP Business Warehouse and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,877 professionals have used our research since 2012.