Progress Data Platform vs. SAP BW/4HANA vs. Vertica Analytics Database

SAP BW/4HANA is well suited for warehousing solution when majority of the source systems are SAP. With ODP BW and ODP CDS view source system types, SAP standard extractors and CDS view based extractors provides the best support for delta extraction with less lead time for data availability to report. It is less appropriate for the scenarios to do AI/ML use cases for forecasting and predictive scenarios as there are limited options. It is less appropriate for the scenarios to use recent responsive AI tools and LLM.

Incentivized

As someone just starting out with data analytics and warehousing vertica is a great tool for a small scale business. It has amazing performance and can scale upto TBs of data. It works well for any organization which has about 100 - 500 DAUs of the system. The system doesn't require a lot of ops overhead. Scaling for PB data and 1000s of DAU is vertica's weak point. The system is just not designed for large scale usage and still has a long way to go to improve scalability. There are experiments to run Vertica query engine on top of HDFS which seem promising, however - if you have the the Hadoop ecosystem you are better off going the HDFS + Presto/Impala/SparkSQL route. But if you are in the Hadoop ecosystem, you probably are already investing a lot in ops.

Incentivized

• BI and Reporting out of the ERP Layer
• Self Service Capabilities to build reports and cubes out of SAP
• Great Performance for simple and analytical reporting out of SAP
• Broad availability of BW Tools to integrate - such as Business Explorer

Incentivized

• Column-oriented storage organization, which increases performance of queries.
• Compression, which reduces storage costs and I/O bandwidth. High compression is possible because columns of homogeneous datatypes are stored together and because updates to the main store are batched.
• Shared nothing architecture, which reduces system contention for shared resources and allows gradual degradation of performance in the face of hardware failure.
• Easy to use and maintain through automated data replication, server recovery, query optimization, and storage optimization.
• Support for standard programming interfaces ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET, and OLEDB.
• Integration to Hadoop with the capability to perform analytics on ORC and Parquet files directly.

Incentivized

• It would be nice to see tools available within SAP BW/4HANA for cross platform esp. other SAP systems integration from a data extraction and scheduling standpoint. This is to ensure BW data stays consistent with its sources and is refreshed only after completion of core business process activities in its source systems. This is also relevant from a SAC and Datasphere integration standpoint for data being fed from SAP BW/4HANA as these platforms currently only support time based scheduling options with no dependencies possible against SAP BW/4HANA processes. Currently most companies employ an external third party scheduling tool to manage this.
• With the advent of Analysis for Office the ability to publish AFO workbooks has been lost directly from the SAP BW/4HANA platform unlike its BEx Analyzer predecessor which had the Broadcaster. The use of BO Platform is not an ideal use case for this functionality which is very basic in its scope.
• In this age of AI would be nice to see functionality introduced for AI co-pilots like Joule to speed by data modeling and scheduling activities as well as a natural language based querying options within AFO.

Incentivized

• One time, one of the nodes wasn't coming up because of some ambiguity with the local data. Vertica wasn't able to fix it by itself and we were trying to remove the node out of the database and we couldn't do it. It would be great if that could be addressed. Luckily when we rebooted the whole server, some of the dead transaction got flushed because of which vertica was able to recover and the node came up.

Incentivized

SAP BW/4HANA requires specialized skillsets around data warehouse modeling and the access to data, however the modeling capabilities are intuitive and have now become accessible to both SAP and non-SAP data warehouse specialists. This new model allows for Interchangeable skillsets and access to a broader pool of experts throughout the industry, as well as easier access to data.

Incentivized

I never experienced any support issue when using SAP BW/4HANA. The only issues I faced were at the moment of installing the tool in my computer but I got support from the local IT department of my company and was quickly fixed

Incentivized

HP/Micro Focus Vertica support is in par with other bigger vendors. In addition to this, there is enough best practices documentation available for some of the most common ways you will use Vertica that makes it easy to get Vertica up and running.

Incentivized

We chose SAP BW/4HANA for its out of the box integration and ETL capabilities with our landscape of other SAP solutions in addition to the pre-build SAP delivered business content. Integrated BPC also made it a perfect choice for planning and consolidation in one integrated environment. Qlik and Power BI were primarily used as additional visualization tools for business users with data integration against SAP BW/4HANA as opposed to being used as a full blown data warehousing platform. This was however before the introduction of SAP Analytics Cloud.

Incentivized

MySQL and MS SQL Server are both fantastic RDBMS products. MS SQL Server goes a bit further since it has the builtin analytical functions. But it only scales so far. Once the data goes beyond capacity, getting results out just does not happen anymore. IBM Netezza and Teradata were both appliances that required different expertise than we had in house. Vertica was able to do the same, and in some cases better, on commodity hardware (frankly in our case old servers that were slated for recycling!) and at a small scale. In other words, Vertica we could grow slowly over time. Infobright is a great log processing database but for the functions we were looking to serve it just didn't have some of the features Vertica had that we felt were show stoppers.

Incentivized

• Still acting as important point of source for major decisions
• After BW/4HANA Migration there is 20 % increase in the extractions to BW system
• Still we are yet to find a better investment for reporting in SAP , though we use SAC, which has its own issues while dealing with huge volumes of data

Incentivized

• Vertica increased our productivity in analyzing the data and validating simple proof of concepts with our data.
• Results of analytical queries produced from Vertica are used by all departments as well as part of some of our products.

Incentivized