SAP BW/4HANA vs. Snowflake

Some scenarios where SAP BW/4HANA is well suited are retail industry, supply chain, finance, warehouse, stocking processes, BI, [and] some finance analytics reporting. Some scenarios where SAP BW/4HANA is less appropriate [is when] relational queries are needed [and] in some small business with infrastructure limitations. Another scenario that is less appropriate is for ABAP processes requirements.

Incentivized

Snowflake is well suited when you have to store your data and you want easy scalability and increase or decrease the storage per your requirement. You can also control the computing cost, and if your computing cost is less than or equal to 10% of your storage cost, then you don't have to pay for computing, which makes it cost-effective as well.

Incentivized

• High speed data warehouse regardless of data volumes.
• Excellent integration with SAP systems and Data sets.
• Simplified data modelling due to columnar data base.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Enterprise license pricing is very expensive and run-time license limits the usefulness of the tool.
• Integration with SAP Analytics cloud for write-back to BW/4HANA. Live connection is only read from SAC.
• Make run-time licenses more useful.

Incentivized

• Add constraints for views and not just for tables
• Do not force customers to renew for same or higher amount to avoid loosing unused credits. Already paid credits should not expire (at least within a reasonable time frame), independent of renewal deal size.

Incentivized

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

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

Because the fact that you can query tons of data in a few seconds is incredible, it also gives you a lot of functions to format and transform data right in your query, which is ideal when building data models in BI tools like Power BI, it is available as a connector in the most used BI tools worldwide.

Incentivized

SAP Max Attention and general support for SAP BW/4HANA is broadly available. Truth to be told, MaxAttention has a premium cost but brings great engineers. So this being an enterprise capability and extremely critical, we did not consider cost as the main factor since support works well. Just keep that in mind when making your selection.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

SAP Analytics Cloud is complemented by SAP BW/4 HANA through connectors that work in real-time and allow the display of indicator information in interactive and user-friendly visualizations. SAP Data Services integrates with BW/4 HANA allowing to automate the loading of information in the system taking as a data source a wide variety of platforms.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Faster turn-around to enhancements
• End users can query structures that are not limited to multi-dimensional models.
• Performance improvements means that business user can do more in the same time compared to traditional BW

Incentivized

• With separate compute and storage feature, the queries get executed quickly and it improves our overall productivity.
• Earlier we were using a different product for analytical purposes, but with Snowflake's in-built analytical feature we are now able to save money.
• Snowflake is cost efficient, features like auto suspend for compute resources helped to control the costs.

Incentivized