We performed a comparison between SAP BW4HANA and SAP IQ 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."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."
"Out of the box, this solution has a lot of standard features."
"The most valuable feature is that we can transform a huge amount of data and apply business logic as per the requirements."
"We can get good visualization and less redundant data."
"The solution is easier to maintain than traditional SAP products."
"The most valuable feature is that it's robust."
"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."
"We like that it is an SAP product, so we can easily connect with the SAP ERP system."
"The column-based technologies (basically all the database for ITP) are used for SAP IQ. It is used as a column-based solution."
"The primary benefit of SAP IQ is its ability to limit the expansion of the costly SAP HANA database, which has limited storage capacity. This necessitates a form of data management that involves moving data from SAP HANA to SAP NLS, which is essentially archiving. This allows us to retain access to the data via a link whenever it is required."
"Columnar storage allows high compression, high load rates and high query performance."
"It is very robust for ad hoc DW queries and its columnar compression is unique and valuable."
"Unbeatable speed and compression with a colummn-structured relational database."
"Valuable features for us include the compression, speed, fast response time, and easy object maintenance."
"Not a ten because it's expensive and its ecosystem is not very open."
"The solution is not scalable. It does not have a data streaming feature as well."
"Support could be more reliable."
"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."
"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."
"The product needs to improve with more performance and fewer data layers."
"It takes too long to escalate problems from the first level of support."
"The room for improvement would be the marketing of the product, because this product is much better than advertised."
"Concurrency and functional error messaging."
"The organization who owns the product does not support it well and appears not to be doing significant development for the future."
"I think the universe should be part of the Sybase IQ tool set."
"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 solution works best when combined with other SAP solutions. If the environment has other systems other options might be better."
SAP BW4HANA is ranked 7th in Data Warehouse with 34 reviews while SAP IQ is ranked 16th in Data Warehouse with 17 reviews. SAP BW4HANA is rated 7.4, while SAP IQ is rated 8.0. 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 IQ writes "Easy to use, highly stable, but integration could improve". SAP BW4HANA is most compared with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, SAP HANA and Apache Hadoop, whereas SAP IQ is most compared with Snowflake, SAP HANA, SQL Server, Apache Hadoop and SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise. See our SAP BW4HANA vs. SAP IQ report.
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