We performed a comparison between SAP BW4HANA and SAP HANA based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Oracle, Teradata and others in Data Warehouse."Some of the main features of this solution are that it uses HANA and it has good performance."
"It is a stable solution."
"The most valuable feature is that it's robust."
"The product has efficient performance."
"From an ERP point of view and a functionality point of view, it works very well. The benefits are in that of financial costing and material management."
"I like the reporting features of the solution."
"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."
"Its direct approach is the most valuable. You get more real time and capabilities than BW."
"We appreciate that the current, redesigned version of this solution that is much more straightforward for new users, and has been well thought out with industry best practice standards in mind."
"The initial setup is straightforward. It usually takes around eight months but it depends on a customer's requirements. We can spend a month or two customizing."
"SAP HANA is one of the best databases known for its performance...The new version of the solution is stable."
"We like that the product is both vertically and horizontally scalable, allowing us to do around 86 percent compression of documentation from 50 to seven terabytes."
"We use SAP HANA for Master Data Governance."
"The solution offers advanced features that the company was struggling to implement."
"It has a very huge bandwidth and data transfer."
"One feature I find very valuable, is the response time of the application on the database memory."
"The solution does occasionally get a few bugs, but this is typical for any product."
"I would like more integration."
"The product needs to improve with more performance and fewer data layers."
"Pricing would be a good improvement. A lot of customers think that it's very expensive and especially support is very expensive."
"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."
"We cannot integrate with third-party tools like Python or advanced integration options. You can't fine-tune tables within BW or generate specific views or reports."
"The tool is not easy to use for an end user."
"Other competitors provide better solutions that are more up to date with current technology."
"In my limited experience using SAP, the process of granting access to different modules is difficult. Specifically, the requirement to assign roles and key codes to users rather than being able to assign them individually made the process more complex. It would be beneficial if there was a way to assign key codes separately, rather than having to create multiple roles. This would make managing access easier."
"I don't have direct access to SAP, and instead, I need to go through the SAP office in India."
"You cannot apply mulit-join inside the calculation views, for example, when you are joining tables."
"The only downside of the product is that it is an expensive solution that needs to consider lowering its prices to improve the product."
"The solution could improve by having better migration flexibility. For example, it would be helpful if there was a way for customers could check their nonproduction and production deployments."
"It is challenging to integrate it with third-party tools."
"The documentation can be improved in the future."
"In a future release, SAP HANA should add a module for taxation, such as income tax and withholding tax."
SAP BW4HANA is ranked 7th in Data Warehouse with 34 reviews while SAP HANA is ranked 1st in Embedded Database with 79 reviews. SAP BW4HANA is rated 7.4, while SAP HANA is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of SAP BW4HANA writes "An easy-to-operate and administer tool that needs to consider revising its existing licensing cost". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SAP HANA writes "Excellent compatibility between modules and the control". SAP BW4HANA is most compared with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, SQL Server and SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse, whereas SAP HANA is most compared with Oracle Database, SQL Server, MySQL, IBM Db2 Database and Denodo.
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