We performed a comparison between Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics and SAP BW4HANA based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Cloud Data Warehouse solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The architecture, including compute and storage, is good."
"Fills the gap between big data and classic data warehouses."
"The solution's best feature is its predictive analytics."
"Can capture all the transactional data throughout a company."
"Synapse Analytics' best features are notebooks, pipelines, and monitoring."
"The setup is pretty simple."
"I have not used the technical support from Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, but I worked with the developers at Microsoft who were top-notch."
"It's user-friendly and has a good dashboard."
"Its direct approach is the most valuable. You get more real time and capabilities than BW."
"You can do hierarchical alert slicing and dicing out-of-box, which is not available in other solutions. I haven't come across that in Oracle or any other software provider."
"I like that it's quite quick."
"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."
"We like that it is an SAP product, so we can easily connect with the SAP ERP system."
"The most valuable feature is that we can transform a huge amount of data and apply business logic as per the requirements."
"Some of the main features of this solution are that it uses HANA and it has good performance."
"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."
"Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics's overall integration within the Azure ecosystem could improve. The native Microsoft solution versus another solution, such as Databricks, there are areas where there could be some improvements."
"Comes with a pretty steep learning curve."
"Its stability is an issue. They have been releasing a version every six months to one year, which means that there are many versions available, and clients are not up to speed on the latest one that they're offering. From a stability point of view, they could do better. They're still upgrading their Synapse Analytics workspace, and it is not that stable. Its scalability can also be better."
"Synapse Analytics' performance slows down if you don't get your distribution right because it gets queued and goes into a single node."
"They should provide a less expensive version with a smaller setup for small businesses. Currently, its price is quite high for entry-level or small businesses. In terms of integration, new connectors are always welcomed."
"It's a complicated product."
"Could have more connectors and better integration for Hadoop."
"Indicating what areas need improvement in this solution is a difficult question because the organizations that I am working for are really new in this area. However, an even better more simple interface, or perhaps an extension of a connector app store solution, would be helpful."
"Other competitors provide better solutions that are more up to date with current technology."
"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."
"The speed of operations could be a little faster."
"The solution is not easy to implement. It requires a lot of learning at the beginning."
"It's complicated to use. You need to spend a lot of time learning about it. The interface could be improved. It's not intuitive to build a data model and use their ETL tools."
"There's one area where the other vendors have an upper edge, which is the data lake. I think SAP is trying to figure out whether to stick with IQ, their own data lake solution, or push customers toward customer-preferred vendors, like Azure Data Lake, AWS, or any other provider."
"BW/4HANA could improve query optimization. For example, there could be an error message that pops up when you hover over it if any query fails. That would make it easier to find out what went gone wrong. Guided SAP help tools would make it easier for us to go forward."
"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."
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Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is ranked 3rd in Cloud Data Warehouse with 47 reviews while SAP BW4HANA is ranked 5th in Data Warehouse with 11 reviews. Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is rated 7.8, while SAP BW4HANA is rated 7.4. The top reviewer of Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics writes "Multifeatured, has better performance over other solutions, and lets users manage structured and unstructured information, but the platform needs to be more user-friendly". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SAP BW4HANA writes "Enables consolidation of data across an organisation onto a single platform for enterprise data insights & analytics ". Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics is most compared with Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, Azure Data Factory, Apache Hadoop and AWS Lake Formation, whereas SAP BW4HANA is most compared with Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, Oracle Exadata and Apache Hadoop. See our Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics vs. SAP BW4HANA report.
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