SAP Business Warehouse vs. Snowflake

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
SAP BW
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
SAP Business Warehouse, or SAP BW (formerly SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse) is SAP's legacy data warehouse solution, now superseded by SAP BW/4HANA, and the SAP Data Warehouse Cloud which was launched in 2019. SAP BW versions up to 7.4 have reached end of maintenance. SAP BW 7.5 support is extended to align with SAP Business Suite with NetWeaver components. For existing customers maintenance is scheduled to continue through 2027, with extended support available through 2030.N/A
Snowflake
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
The Snowflake Cloud Data Platform is the eponymous data warehouse with, from the company in San Mateo, a cloud and SQL based DW that aims to allow users to unify, integrate, analyze, and share previously siloed data in secure, governed, and compliant ways. With it, users can securely access the Data Cloud to share live data with customers and business partners, and connect with other organizations doing business as data consumers, data providers, and data service providers.N/A
Pricing
SAP Business WarehouseSnowflake
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
SAP BWSnowflake
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
SAP Business WarehouseSnowflake
Considered Both Products
SAP BW
Chose SAP Business Warehouse
Coordination and integration with other SAP software and products, as well as its speed and simplicity in reporting, make it one of our current choices
Snowflake
Chose Snowflake
While Snowflake is more open to cloud eco system, SAP integrated well with SAP eco system products like SAP ECC or SAP S/4. So for people who have invested heavily in SAP eco system including SAP ECC or S/4, it makes sense to go with SAP DWC which is also evolving very rapidly. …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
SAP Business WarehouseSnowflake
Access Control and Security
Comparison of Access Control and Security features of Product A and Product B
SAP Business Warehouse
8.8
3 Ratings
2% above category average
Snowflake
-
Ratings
Multi-User Support (named login)9.73 Ratings00 Ratings
Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)9.03 Ratings00 Ratings
Single Sign-On (SSO)9.73 Ratings00 Ratings
Location-Based Data Governance7.03 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Modeling
Comparison of Data Modeling features of Product A and Product B
SAP Business Warehouse
9.0
3 Ratings
12% above category average
Snowflake
-
Ratings
Data model creation9.03 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Exploration
Comparison of Data Exploration features of Product A and Product B
SAP Business Warehouse
5.7
3 Ratings
5% above category average
Snowflake
-
Ratings
Visualization5.73 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Warehouse
Comparison of Data Warehouse features of Product A and Product B
SAP Business Warehouse
7.7
3 Ratings
7% above category average
Snowflake
-
Ratings
High-Volume Data Processing8.03 Ratings00 Ratings
Data Warehouse Management9.33 Ratings00 Ratings
Administrative Automation7.73 Ratings00 Ratings
Self-Optimization6.03 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
SAP Business WarehouseSnowflake
Small Businesses
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.6 out of 10
Google BigQuery
Google BigQuery
Score 8.6 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub
Cloudera Enterprise Data Hub
Score 9.0 out of 10
Db2
Db2
Score 8.7 out of 10
Enterprises
Oracle Exadata
Oracle Exadata
Score 8.0 out of 10
Db2
Db2
Score 8.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
SAP Business WarehouseSnowflake
Likelihood to Recommend
8.3
(15 ratings)
9.3
(37 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Usability
-
(0 ratings)
8.7
(13 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.7
(8 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
SAP Business WarehouseSnowflake
Likelihood to Recommend
SAP
SAP BW is best for: 1. Large enterprises 2. Enterprises with 3+ legacy systems with entrenched users (politically difficult to merge) 3. Enterprises with employees who can understand both the technical capabilities of SAP BW and the needs of the business users - ability to speak both languages, otherwise the program could be unwieldy and potentially underutilized (it's not particularly inexpensive) SAP BW is less appropriate for: 1. Small enterprises 2. Enterprises who have well established, same location, CRM and UFS - the integration of data analysis will be easier and less expensive with other solutions 3. HANA
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Snowflake Computing
I am over our HR data, and we use Workday for our HR management system. I have a script in place that runs reports on Workday and saves the results as CSVs. I can then use stages in Snowflake to insert these CSVs into Snowflake, then I can insert or truncate and replace these staged tables into a final schema. Then once these are in a schema I can reference them and build out my data models. In addition to ingesting CSVs, Snowflake has the ability to write a CSV file to our Amazon S3 bucket. Ingesting these CSVs, transforming the data, then delivering it to a destination would've involved so much more coding than my current process if we were on any other platform.
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Pros
SAP
  • It tracks bin locations for parts which can be really helpful.
  • SAP Business Warehouse tells you who has a part checked out so you can find it.
  • It shows current parts shortages so buyers are flagged to get parts on order based on current demand.
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Snowflake Computing
  • Snowflake scales appropriately allowing you to manage expense for peak and off peak times for pulling and data retrieval and data centric processing jobs
  • Snowflake offers a marketplace solution that allows you to sell and subscribe to different data sources
  • Snowflake manages concurrency better in our trials than other premium competitors
  • Snowflake has little to no setup and ramp up time
  • Snowflake offers online training for various employee types
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Cons
SAP
  • Support comes slow. This is not a limitation of the software itself but could be a symptom from the local office. Once we get support everything works along smoothly.
  • It is always important to review the instructions. This is not a system that does well initially with personalization without review of standard procedures. A log of time can be lost if the technicians and programmers working with the data are not following correct procedures.
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Snowflake Computing
  • This tool is very much technical and proper knowledge is required, so mostly you have to hire an IT team.
  • I wish if various videos could be available for basic quires like its initiation, then I think it would act as a guideline and would help the beginners a lot.
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Likelihood to Renew
SAP
No answers on this topic
Snowflake Computing
SnowFlake is very cost effective and we also like the fact we can stop, start and spin up additional processing engines as we need to. We also like the fact that it's easy to connect our SQL IDEs to Snowflake and write our queries in the environment that we are used to
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Usability
SAP
No answers on this topic
Snowflake Computing
The interface is similar to other SQL query systems I've used and is fairly easy to use. My only complaint is the syntax issues. Another thing is that the error messages are not always the easiest thing to understand, especially when you incorporate temp tables. Some of that is to be expected with any new database.
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Support Rating
SAP
No answers on this topic
Snowflake Computing
We have had terrific experiences with Snowflake support. They have drilled into queries and given us tremendous detail and helpful answers. In one case they even figured out how a particular product was interacting with Snowflake, via its queries, and gave us detail to go back to that product's vendor because the Snowflake support team identified a fault in its operation. We got it solved without lots of back-and-forth or finger-pointing because the Snowflake team gave such detailed information.
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Alternatives Considered
SAP
SAP Business Warehouse scores higher in data warehouse functionalities for integration to SAP ERP and other SAP solutions such as SAP CRM, SAP APO, and SAP SRM. Standard SAP data source extractors which are available in SAP ERP can be used immediately for full or delta replication into SAP Business Warehouse. System governance in SAP Business Warehouse is top-notch with change management support for migration between system landscape from the development system to production system.
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Snowflake Computing
I have had the experience of using one more database management system at my previous workplace. What Snowflake provides is better user-friendly consoles, suggestions while writing a query, ease of access to connect to various BI platforms to analyze, [and a] more robust system to store a large amount of data. All these functionalities give the better edge to Snowflake.
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Return on Investment
SAP
  • Exporting of data and reports to Excel is very easy for the end user to interpret and manipulate.
  • Negatively, the speed at which BW retrieves data and reports is very slow and out of date.
  • Addition of daughter application HANA has helped this aging application stay afloat for a few more years. Overall it has been a great tool but it's showing its age very fast.
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Snowflake Computing
  • Positive impact: we use Snowflake to track our subscription and payment charges, which we use for internal and investor reporting
  • Positive impact: 3 times faster query speed compared to Treasure Data means that answers to stakeholders can be delivered quicker by analysts
  • Positive impact: recommender systems now source their data from Snowflake rather than Spark clusters, improving development speed, and no longer require maintainence of Spark clusters.
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ScreenShots

Snowflake Screenshots

Screenshot of Snowflake Installation