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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
6.3
Number of Reviews
25
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (14th)
SAP IQ
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.7
Number of Reviews
21
Ranking in other categories
Relational Databases Tools (26th), Data Warehouse (13th)
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Tejas Raj - PeerSpot reviewer
Columnar database, so pulling records is easy but there isn't enough documentation for installation
I've seen very few SAP IQ systems in recent years. So people are moving away from SAP IQ In the last three years, I've rarely encountered customers using it. Fewer systems with SAP IQ usage among our customers. Most of them have moved on to HANA. There are parallel products, and there are also viable alternatives from AWS, so many have migrated to those.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"SAP Business Warehouse is a scalable solution."
"Having the back-end data set with the right information is the best qualification for this solution."
"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."
"I like that it integrates to open-source."
"The product is very stable."
"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."
"The key element in this solution is its rapid response. If you have a question about prices, buyers, customers, providers, or services, you need the answer in a minute or two. That's the key benefit for us that a solution like BW gives us."
"The features that I have found most valuable are its capabilities to connect to Excel and to slice and dice."
"IQ is a very high-performance and high-transaction database."
"The initial setup is easy."
"All data is compressed and indexed, allowing for fast execution of transactions."
"Valuable features for us include the compression, speed, fast response time, and easy object maintenance."
"It is very robust for ad hoc DW queries and its columnar compression is unique and valuable."
"The column-based technologies (basically all the database for ITP) are used for SAP IQ. It is used as a column-based solution."
"Columnar storage allows high compression, high load rates and high query performance."
"Unbeatable speed and compression with a colummn-structured relational database."
 

Cons

"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."
"There is room for improvement from a technical perspective."
"The way the data is stored is kind of rigid in SAP BW as a product. It could be more flexible so that when we are designing a solution, we can design our own data structures and try to improve performance."
"We are very unhappy with technical support. First of all, they send their sales agents or pre-sales agents and most of them who don't know the solution as a properly trained tech would. We have an on-site SAP representative who is supposed to help us with our high priority and production issues, and they're not satisfactory to say the least."
"The solution should be more open to the cloud."
"In the next release, my suggestion would be to have user-friendly interfaces and performance issues be addressed."
"SAP Business Warehouse could integrate better with other ETL tools."
"The solution could offer better connectivity with other databases."
"Concurrency and functional error messaging."
"Multiplex is very problematic. There are consistency problems in the metadata, meaning it is possible to lose metadata consistency. You should make sure you have healthy backups."
"The only negative aspect of IQ is the cost, which can be challenging for companies in Peru."
"I think the universe should be part of the Sybase IQ tool set."
"The organization who owns the product does not support it well and appears not to be doing significant development for the future."
"There is very little documentation available."
"The primary negative aspect is the cost, which can be a challenge due to the economic conditions in Peru."
"The room for improvement would be the marketing of the product, because this product is much better than advertised."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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."
"It's moderately expensive, but definitely has its branding and price value for it."
"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."
"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive."
"Negotiation is very important."
"The only costs after standard licensing fees are for add-ons and upgrades."
"It's not that costly. So, the pricing is cheap."
"Negotiate based on the features required."
"Evaluate all options; check to see if you need expensive add-ons."
"The cost of implementation is about $3,000."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Government
10%
Computer Software Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
46%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Healthcare Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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...
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?
The primary negative aspect is the cost, which can be a challenge due to the economic conditions in Peru.
What is your primary use case for SAP IQ?
I worked on implementing new databases, migration data in production, and developer environments with SAP IQ.
 

Comparisons

 

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 SAP Business Warehouse vs. SAP IQ and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
850,028 professionals have used our research since 2012.