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SAP Business Warehouse vs SAP IQ 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

SAP Business Warehouse
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (15th)
SAP IQ
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
22
Ranking in other categories
Relational Databases Tools (23rd), Data Warehouse (14th)
 

Featured Reviews

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.
KK
Tech Director at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Works well with existing platform integration but could improve error messaging and technical support
I do not use SAP IQ's machine learning capabilities. I cannot assess the benefit of SAP IQ's distributed query processing for complex queries, as I am a non-technical operator. I am not sure if we use SAP IQ's data compression features. I think the compression we are doing is on the data storage level and not on the database level. I believe we do not use it, but I'm not certain. We do not utilize SAP IQ's support for unstructured data, as we do not have unstructured data. I do not have any strong opinions on SAP IQ's security features such as data encryption. It's not been something that has been much in focus, neither in our choice of the platform, nor in our daily operations. I guess they're satisfactory as they have not been a problem. I am not aware of the pricing and licensing of SAP IQ, as it's part of a bigger agreement, and I'm not the owner of that agreement. My impression is that SAP IQ is a rather expensive tool in terms of value for money. On a scale of 1-10, I rate SAP IQ a 7.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The features that I have found most valuable are its capabilities to connect to Excel and to slice and dice."
"SAP Business Warehouse is a scalable solution."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"The real-time information is great."
"All data is compressed and indexed, allowing for fast execution of transactions."
"It has the best performance in data retrieval compared to other database engines and reduces HW cost, achieving up to 70% less storage; Database is smaller than input data, even with all the indexes."
"Columnar storage allows high compression, high load rates and high query performance."
"We can now have over one billion rows in a table for semi-real trans-national querying."
"Unbeatable speed and compression with a colummn-structured relational database."
"But I do not think that other products really have an advantage for warehousing over the SAP IQ solution."
"The initial setup is easy."
"The product itself is the best in the industry, which I liked and would like to work with again."
 

Cons

"More integration with Microsoft Office products (not just Excel) would be helpful."
"In the next release, my suggestion would be to have user-friendly interfaces and performance issues be addressed."
"The big minuses are its not being user friendly."
"When some things go wrong, it becomes extremely unreliable."
"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."
"What I'd like to improve in SAP Business Warehouse is its data structure, that's a little bit rigid. It could be a bit more flexible, so you can design your data structure and improve performance when creating a solution. Currently, the way data is stored in SAP Business Warehouse is rigid."
"We are running an older version; it is doing what we need it to do but there is some limitation due to its version."
"The way the data is stored is kind of rigid in SAP BW as a product."
"I think the universe should be part of the Sybase IQ tool set."
"The primary negative aspect is the cost, which can be a challenge due to the economic conditions in Peru."
"A production database server should never crash in response to user input, but Sybase IQ has repeatedly done that for us, over multiple revisions of the product."
"In my interaction with SAP IQ's technical support, the people we are talking to don't know this application very thoroughly."
"The organization who owns the product does not support it well and appears not to be doing significant development for the future."
"The solution works best when combined with other SAP solutions. If the environment has other systems other options might be better."
"Very few people are familiar with this technology, as training programs are very expensive."
"A production database server should never crash in response to user input, but Sybase IQ has repeatedly done that for us, over multiple revisions of the product."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is quite expensive."
"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."
"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive."
"I would not recommend it to small-scale companies. The price is too much."
"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."
"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 license for SAP Business Warehouse is paid yearly, and there's no extra cost in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"Negotiation is very important."
"Negotiate based on the features required."
"The cost of implementation is about $3,000."
"Evaluate all options; check to see if you need expensive add-ons."
"It's not that costly. So, the pricing is cheap."
"The only costs after standard licensing fees are for add-ons and upgrades."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
13%
Construction Company
11%
Healthcare Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Financial Services Firm
26%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business6
Midsize Enterprise2
Large Enterprise16
 

Questions from the Community

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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP IQ?
IQ implementation costs about three thousand dollars. It's less expensive compared to alternatives like Teradata Base in terms of transactional efficiency.
What needs improvement with SAP IQ?
When it comes to SAP IQ, the areas that could be improved or enhanced include the error messaging and the locking capabilities, as that's where we often encounter problems. When there is an issue, ...
What is your primary use case for SAP IQ?
Our usual use cases for SAP IQ is that we have a Software-as-a-Service architecture where this database is the foundation for our SAP BusinessObjects platform. This is where it's getting its data f...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Sybase IQ
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Medtronic, Cirque du Soleil, Antarc, B&G Manufacturing, EarlySense, eBay, Ferrero, James Austin Company, Lenovo, Sagem, RAK Ceramics, Vodafone
ASR Group, Citrix, State of Indiana, PocketCard Co. Ltd.
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.