We performed a comparison between Oracle Big Data Appliance and SAP BW4HANA 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.
"Because Big Data Appliance allows me to have a single source of truth, it means I have clean data that can be monetized and leveraged to gain more insights with real-time reports from the dashboard."
"The most valuable feature is that we can transform a huge amount of data and apply business logic as per the requirements."
"We like that it is an SAP product, so we can easily connect with the SAP ERP system."
"We benefited from BW/4HANA's ability to utilize predefined content inside. We didn't need to start from scratch."
"Some of the main features of this solution are that it uses HANA and it has good performance."
"I like that it's quite quick."
"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."
"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."
"From a technical perspective, Big Data Appliance could be improved with more innovation in the AI and machine-learning parts instead of relying on Cloudera."
"I would like more integration."
"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."
"Other competitors provide better solutions that are more up to date with current technology."
"If I want to have good reporting, then I have to buy a separate license."
"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 easy to implement. It requires a lot of learning at the beginning."
"The speed of operations could be a little faster."
"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."
Oracle Big Data Appliance is ranked 13th in Data Warehouse with 1 review while SAP BW4HANA is ranked 6th in Data Warehouse with 9 reviews. Oracle Big Data Appliance is rated 8.0, while SAP BW4HANA is rated 7.2. The top reviewer of Oracle Big Data Appliance writes "Provides clean, centralized data ". 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 ". Oracle Big Data Appliance is most compared with Oracle Exadata, Apache Hadoop, Teradata, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics and IBM Integrated Analytics System, whereas SAP BW4HANA is most compared with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse and Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse.
See our list of best Data Warehouse vendors.
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