SAP IQ vs Snowflake comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between SAP IQ and Snowflake based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Oracle, Teradata and others in Data Warehouse.
To learn more, read our detailed Data Warehouse Report (Updated: February 2023).
686,748 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"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."

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"This is the advanced version of the cloud version, so it's really a flexible tool. If you have it implemented at home, you can access it from anywhere.""A user-friendly and reliable solution.""It requires no maintenance on our part. They handle all that. The speed is phenomenal. The pricing isn't really anything more than what you would be paying for a SQL server license or another tool to execute the same thing. We have zero maintenance on our side to do anything and the speed at which it performs queries and loads the data is amazing. It handles unstructured data extremely well, too. So, if the data is in a JSON array or an XML, it handles that super well.""Snowflake is faster than on-premise systems and allows for variable compute power based on need.""Snowflake is an enormously useful platform. The Snowpipe feature is valuable because it allows us to load terabytes and petabytes of data into the data mart at a very low cost.""The most valuable feature is the clone copy.""The way it is built and designed is valuable. The way the shared model is built and the way it exploits the power of the cloud is very good. Certain features related to administration and management, akin to Oracle Flashback and all that, are very important for modern-day administration and management. It is also good in terms of managing and improving performance, indexing, and partitioning. It is sort of completely automated. Everything is essentially under the hood, and the engine takes care of it all. As a data warehouse on the cloud, Snowflake stands strong on its ground even though each of the cloud providers has its own data warehouse, such as Redshift for AWS or Synapse for Azure.""I like the fact that we don't need a DBA. It automatically scales stuff."

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Cons
"The solution works best when combined with other SAP solutions. If the environment has other systems other options might be better."

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"The data sharing capabilities across business units within the organization should be better.""They need to incorporate some basic OLAP capabilities in the backend or at the database level. Currently, it is purely a database. They call it purely a data warehouse for the cloud. Currently, just like any database, we have to calculate all the KPIs in the front-end tools. The same KPIs again need to be calculated in Snowflake. It would be very helpful if they can include some OLAP features. This will bring efficiency because we will be able to create the KPIs within Snowflake itself and then publish them to multiple front-end tools. We won't have to recreate the same in each project. There should be the ability to automate raised queries, which is currently not possible. There should also be something for Exception Aggregation and things like that.""The solution could use a little bit more UI.""In a future release we would like to have a link which would allow us to connect to an external database and create certain views in your own database. This is because it is becoming hard for us to compare the data between multiple sources.""If we can have a feature where the results can be moved to different tabs, so that I can compare the results with earlier queries before applying the changes, it would be great.""There are three things that came to my notice. I am not very sure whether they have already done it. The first one is very specific to the virtual data warehouse. Snowflake might want to offer industry-specific models for the data warehouse. Snowflake is a very strong product with credit. For a typical retail industry, such as the pharma industry, if it can get into the functional space as well, it will be a big shot in their arm. The second thing is related to the migration from other data warehouses to Snowflake. They can make the migration a little bit more seamless and easy. It should be compatible, well-structured, and well-governed. Many enterprises have huge impetus and urgency to move to Snowflake from their existing data warehouse, so, naturally, this is an area that is critical. The third thing is related to the capability of dealing with relational and dimensional structures. It is not that friendly with relational structures. Snowflake is more friendly with the dimensional structure or the data masks, which is characteristic of a Kimball model. It is very difficult to be savvy and friendly with both structures because these structures are different and address different kinds of needs. One is manipulation-heavy, and the other one is read-heavy or analysis-heavy. One is for heavy or frequent changes and amendments, and the other one is for frequent reads. One is flat, and the other one is distributed. There are fundamental differences between these two structures. If I were to consider Snowflake as a silver bullet, it should be equally savvy on both ends, which I don't think is the case. Maybe the product has grown and scaled up from where it was.""I see room for improvement when it comes to credit performance. The other thing I'd like to be improved is the warehouse facility.""Snowflake could improve migration. It should be made easier. It would be beneficial if it could offer some OLTP features. One of our customers was using Oracle for both data warehousing and OLTP workloads, and they were able to migrate their data warehousing workloads to Snowflake without major issues. However, for some of their OLTP requirements, such as needing a response time of fewer than 10 milliseconds for certain queries, Snowflake is currently unable to provide that."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
Information Not Available
  • "They give a different price for every single company. I don't know if I negotiated that well, but we got the enterprise tier for $3 a credit, and the other two were a dollar-ninety a credit. I suspect we don't have almost zero compute usage, but I know that our annual contract packages are below all of their minimums."
  • "There is a separation of storage and compute, so you only pay for what you use."
  • "There is a licensing for this solution and we purchased an enterprise license. Overall the solution is cost-effective."
  • "I am not much aware of the price, but based on what I have analyzed so far, its cost is reasonable as compared to on-prem data warehouse solutions. It provides a great deal for production."
  • "The price of the solution is reasonable."
  • "You need to be aware of the bloating costs. It is easy to use, but if you don't use it wisely, then your monthly bill can bloat a lot. You need to be a bit aware of its consumption cost."
  • "It is hard to say because we're usually engaged in the transition as opposed to the long term. Their storage costs are easily within pennies of what AWS S3 would normally cost. Most of the clients I've been working with are in the financial sector, and they're relatively small. I would put them in an SMB connection. The first thing we have to bring up for people is that they're going to build this. They shouldn't store their data in S3. They should pipeline directly into Snowflake and use it on their storage. So, the cost is a big issue because these are small to medium size companies, and that is the biggest thing we had to price point for them."
  • "I believe that pricing is reasonable for this solution."
  • More Snowflake Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer:The solution works best when combined with other SAP solutions. If the environment has other systems other options might be better.
    Top Answer:We are using SAP IQ as secondary storage for our SAP systems.
    Top Answer:Snowflake has three great features: Snowpiping is proving to be very valuable, Time Travel is excellent, and Snowpipes are another great functionality the solution has made available.
    Top Answer:Part of the problem with the pricing is that it is very difficult for businesses to get an idea of how expensive it might be until they actually start using Snowflake. Until they start pushing large… more »
    Top Answer:Snowflake needs transparency over costs and pricing.
    Ranking
    17th
    out of 33 in Data Warehouse
    Views
    1,277
    Comparisons
    991
    Reviews
    0
    Average Words per Review
    0
    Rating
    N/A
    1st
    out of 33 in Data Warehouse
    Views
    37,697
    Comparisons
    25,542
    Reviews
    44
    Average Words per Review
    541
    Rating
    8.4
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Sybase IQ
    Snowflake Computing
    Learn More
    Overview

    SAP® IQ software delivers speed and power for extreme-scale enterprise data warehousing and analytics. Its column-oriented, grid-based massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture and patented data compression and indexing technologies enable companies to exploit the value of huge amounts of data at the speed of business.

    Snowflake is a fully managed SaaS (software as a service) that provides a single platform for data warehousing, data lakes, data engineering, data science, data application development, and secure sharing and consumption of real-time / shared data.

    Its platform is made up of three components:

    1. Cloud services: As part of its cloud services, Snowflake uses ANSI SQL, which empowers users to optimize their data and manage their infrastructure, while Snowflake handles the security and encryption of stored data.
    1. Query processing: With Snowflake, workload concurrency is never a problem because its compute layer is made up of virtual cloud data warehouses that let you analyze data through requests. Each of the warehouses do not compete for computing resources nor do they affect the performance of each other.
    1. Database storage: Snowflake manages all parts of the data storage process automatically, including file size, compression, organization, structure, and metadata, as well as statistics.

    Snowflake Features

    Snowflake has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Scalability: Snowflake architecture provides nearly unlimited scalability and high speed because it uses a single elastic performance engine. The solution also supports an unlimited amount of concurrent users and workloads, from interactive to batch.
    • Automation: Snowflake makes automation easy and enables enterprises to automate data management, security, governance, availability, and data resiliency.
    • Seamless cross-cloud and cross-region connections: With seamless cross-cloud and cross-region connections, Snowflake eliminates ETL and data silos. Anyone who needs access to shared secure data can get a single copy via the data cloud. In addition, Snowflake makes remote collaboration and decision-making fast and easy via a single shared data source.
    • Third-party data integrations: Snowflake’s Data Marketplace offers third-party data which allows you to connect with Snowflake customers to extend workflows with data services and third-party applications.

    Snowflake Benefits

    There are many benefits to implementing Snowflake. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Helps optimize costs
    • Reduces downtime
    • Improves operational efficiency
    • Built for high reliability and availability
    • Automates data replication for fast recovery

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the Snowflake solution.

    Sreenivasan R., Director of Data Architecture and Engineering at Decision Minds, says, "Data sharing is a good feature. It is a majorly used feature. The elastic compute is another big feature. Separating compute and storage gives you flexibility. It doesn't require much DBA involvement because it doesn't need any performance tuning. We are not really doing any performance tuning, and the entire burden of performance tuning and SQL tuning is on Snowflake. Its usability is very good. I don't need to ramp up any user, and its onboarding is easier. You just onboard the user, and you are done with it. There are simple SQL and UI, and people are able to use this solution easily. Ease of use is a big thing in Snowflake."

    A director of business operations at a logistics company mentions, "It requires no maintenance on our part. They handle all that. The speed is phenomenal. The pricing isn't really anything more than what you would be paying for a SQL server license or another tool to execute the same thing. We have zero maintenance on our side to do anything and the speed at which it performs queries and loads the data is amazing. It handles unstructured data extremely well, too. So, if the data is in a JSON array or an XML, it handles that super well."

    A Solution Architect at a wholesaler/distributor comments, "The ability to share the data and the ability to scale up and down easily are the most valuable features. The concept of data sharing and data plumbing made it very easy to provide and share data. The ability to refresh your Dev or QA just by doing a clone is also valuable. It has the dynamic scale up and scale down feature. Development and deployment are much easier as compared to other platforms where you have to go through a lot of stuff. With a tool like DBT, you can do modeling and transformation within a single tool and deploy to Snowflake. It provides continuous deployment and continuous integration abilities. There is a separation of storage and compute, so you only get charged for your usage. You only pay for what you use. When we share the data downstream with business partners, we can specifically create compute for them, and we can charge back the business."

    Offer
    Learn more about SAP IQ
    Learn more about Snowflake
    Sample Customers
    ASR Group, Citrix, State of Indiana, PocketCard Co. Ltd.
    Accordant Media, Adobe, Kixeye Inc., Revana, SOASTA, White Ops
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm60%
    Healthcare Company10%
    Insurance Company10%
    Manufacturing Company10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company22%
    Financial Services Firm21%
    Comms Service Provider7%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company33%
    Financial Services Firm19%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    Healthcare Company5%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Financial Services Firm14%
    Insurance Company6%
    Healthcare Company6%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise12%
    Large Enterprise71%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business15%
    Midsize Enterprise11%
    Large Enterprise74%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise21%
    Large Enterprise57%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise68%
    Buyer's Guide
    Data Warehouse
    February 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Oracle, Teradata and others in Data Warehouse. Updated: February 2023.
    686,748 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    SAP IQ is ranked 17th in Data Warehouse with 1 review while Snowflake is ranked 1st in Data Warehouse with 45 reviews. SAP IQ is rated 7.0, while Snowflake is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of SAP IQ writes "Easy to use, highly stable, but integration could improve". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Snowflake writes "Easy to set up with great cloning and time travel". SAP IQ is most compared with SAP HANA, Apache Hadoop, SQL Server, SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise and Vertica, whereas Snowflake is most compared with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, Azure Data Factory, Teradata, Vertica and AWS Lake Formation.

    See our list of best Data Warehouse vendors.

    We monitor all Data Warehouse reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.