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Oracle Exadata 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

Oracle Exadata
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
128
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (2nd)
SAP Business Warehouse
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (14th)
 

Featured Reviews

Anand_Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
A solid data warehouse for transactional data that needs to be priced more competitively
Since the product is an appliance, it is very costly. And in the current age, people are cautious about spending this amount of money on any of these types of backend products. Some use cases are in real-time, where all other databases are much faster, but if you talk about the data warehouse, business intelligence, and all other perspectives in the transactional world, Oracle has to reduce the cost. Otherwise, a customer wouldn't want to continue this. If the same thing can be done at half or one-third of the cost, why would people stay with Oracle? Oracle Exadata would not have great value in front of a CFO. Other solutions can guard your data and address security concerns. Security, volumetrics, and so on are also provided by other databases, which are not that costly. Apart from Exadata, Oracle has other tools for business intelligence and other things, which they add on top of Exadata when they're selling a general license. For example, the Vertica database, an HP data warehouse. They have come up with their own analytic engine within the database, which gives an edge for the client to use the data analytics engine as a part of their database. Exadata does not have an analytic engine. Even MySQL has some statistical tools within it. If Exadata integrates analytical tools, it will be good for them.
JavedKhan1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Offers powerful analytics and integration capabilities but requires improved upgrade processes
SAP Business Warehouse could have been better. There is room for improvement from a technical perspective. So, from a technical perspective, when we are upgrading a Business Warehouse server or we are migrating from one place to another, the capability required for this upgradation has many manual activities. It took us around a month to streamline our server. Let’s say there are some transaction codes. Transaction code is a set of programs, and when you want to run a program from the backend, you need to hit the transaction code. It is called a T-code. So during the upgrade, many transaction codes get affected, and as a security consultant, it is my responsibility to recheck those transaction codes which are affected. Sometimes more than 100 codes may get affected, sometimes 500, and sometimes more as well. So, it takes a hell lot of time to integrate them again. That is a limitation or defect within the SAP Business Warehouse. SAP Business Warehouse should come up with proper solutions. Upgradation is an automatic activity. It should happen by itself. We just need to initiate it, and the backend SAP server is automatically upgraded. But it should handle the transactional code as well. They should not get absolutely, and any authorization object should not get deleted from the transaction codes. So, that functionality SAP Business Warehouse should come up with.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Compression is a great feature, where one can really save a lot of storage."
"Regarding features, there are so many that we can offer to customers. When we sell Exadata Cloud, there are many options to choose from, especially when it comes to enterprise database options. In my experience, the main features that are appreciated are various ones like GPS and the assortment of security options."
"We can use virtualization on Exadata."
"It is a scalable solution."
"Exadata with the In-Memory option is several levels about SAP HANA."
"Before using this machine, we took no less than two days to run a report. Now, we can do it within five hours. So, there is a lot of improvement."
"The business intelligence is very good."
"What I found most valuable in Oracle Exadata is its newer technology that gives better performance. It has more recent hardware and significant changes in the architecture, so it's better than older solutions."
"The most useful feature is definitely the speed."
"Having the integration with the reporting tool which is provided by SAP is great."
"The product is very stable."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the advanced structuring of data capabilities. You can get different structures of data to suit your needs."
"The most valuable feature of SAP Business Warehouse is transformation, where I extract data from different sources, particularly the raw data. Then I do some transformations and store that in a format that allows me to do reporting easily."
"The real-time information is great."
"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."
"Having the back-end data set with the right information is the best qualification for this solution."
 

Cons

"We used the support from Oracle Exadata to complete the implementation."
"There is room for improvement with the handling of the Temp IO, which is often used for JOIN statements."
"We have a little trepidation with the system as it does have a learning curve. Also changing to a binary logging format for us feels like retrograde motion, but sadly almost all Linux variants have moved in this direction."
"Oracle Exadata has room for improvement in pricing, especially for smaller companies. The solution is okay for bigger companies, but for smaller companies, it isn't."
"There's room for improvement in terms of deployment, as it could be made faster and more user-friendly."
"We have experienced some issues with processing unstructured data on Exadata. This is an important requirement for our AIML based use case. Reactive analytics data can not be prepared easily in Oracle Exadata."
"It would be good if Exadata made some new features available regarding data retrieval and speed capacity functions."
"Certification should also be improved. Today, Oracle doesn't certify applications with engineered systems."
"I'm not sure if our issue is related to BW or the Analysis Office. However, we're having performance issues in terms of time. It takes a long time to generate the report."
"It takes more work to get the data, including reporting on that data, because some coding is required, and a significant level of transformation is needed when using SAP Business Warehouse."
"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."
"You can start quickly but, when you have to get a little more detailed, when you have to change something, when you have to solve problems, it's not that easy. It's easy to start but evolving is not that easy."
"They should reduce the product’s installation package size for easier downloading."
"In the next release, my suggestion would be to have user-friendly interfaces and performance issues be addressed."
"The solution should be more open to the cloud."
"I would like to see a different end solution in order to read the data and attract internal users."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing of Oracle Exadata is too high."
"The cost of the product could be improved."
"All things considered, the price of this product is fairly high, as is always the case with Oracle."
"The price of Oracle Exadata is expensive. It is not competitive with other solutions some of the times."
"The solution’s cost is a little bit more than the traditional databases."
"I did note that Oracle does tend to internally oversize things especially if they want to fill up a budget, and hence third-party oversight is essential."
"The licensing can be a bit expensive because you need to have certain tools enabled that require them."
"The solution is expensive."
"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"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."
"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."
"The license for SAP Business Warehouse is paid yearly, and there's no extra cost in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"SAP Business Warehouse licensing is a bit expensive compared to other products in the market."
"It's moderately expensive, but definitely has its branding and price value for it."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
32%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
6%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Oracle Exadata?
It is the best solution for OLTP and data warehousing.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Oracle Exadata?
The price is a major consideration. I would rate the price an eight on a scale from one to ten, indicating it is fairly expensive.
What needs improvement with Oracle Exadata?
We recently completed an extension of our storage space. There are minor areas where improvement is needed, such as making the user interface more user-friendly and enhancing configuration and cust...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP Business Warehouse?
The solution is quite expensive. We paid a yearly subscription fee.
What needs improvement with SAP Business Warehouse?
Over a period, we realized that the license and maintenance costs were quite expensive. Every day, we had to run the background job ODS. Eventually, we moved away from SAP Business Warehouse and bo...
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

PayPal, EBS, Organic Food Retailer, Garmin, University of Minnesota, Major Semiconductor Company, Deutsche Bank, Starwood, Ziraat Bank, SK Telecom, and P&G.
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 Oracle Exadata vs. SAP Business Warehouse and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.