SAP BW/4HANA vs. Azure SQL Database

SAP BW/4HANA is certainly an excellent choice when it comes to setting up a data warehousing platform within a landscape of existing SAP systems ecosystem for realizing quick time to value and ROI over the long term. Many non-SAP analytics tools such as Power BI , Qlik also now offer connectors to leverage SAP BW/4HANA data as additional options to deploy third party visualization tools which make it a more open ended platform of choice. But with the future roadmap of SAP and industry in general being focused towards cloud based offerings (SAC and Datasphere) infused with AI capabilities one has to make a judicious choice among these depending on the use case, capabilities of platforms and existing systems landscape and the overall long term IT strategy. SAP BW/4HANA may not be a good platform of choice if starting a native greenfield data warehousing implementation with cloud first approach which would require data integration across SAP and Non-SAP sources and one should consider other SAP cloud offerings which however still have some time to reach a level of maturity as SAP BW/4HANA has reached over the years.

Incentivized

We have found it's a great alternative for making older legacy applications work with online databases instead of only on-premises databases. We've converted over a dozen applications this way, and it has allowed our clients to have a distributed workforce using their applications without incurring the expense of a complete application rewrite.

Incentivized

• With ODP based extraction, SAP BW/4HANA does well to integrate the data from various source systems like S4HANA , S4C.
• With composite providers having the ability to integrate HANA calculation views, we are able to make the best of use of both application layer and data base layer(HANA) for mixed modelling scenarios.
• with data tiering optimization higher data volume are effectively handled as we have the option to control the amount of data that is being stored in HOT , Warm and cold storage. With data volume grows over the year, DTO comes in handy solution to automatically move the delta to appropriate area based on temporature.

Incentivized

• Maintenance is always an issue, so using a cloud solution saves a lot of trouble.
• On premise solutions always suffer from fragmented implementations here and there, where several "dba's" keep track of security and maintenance. With a cloud database it's much easier to keep a central overview.
• Security options in SQL database are next level... data masking, hiding sensitive data where always neglected on premise, whereas you'll get this automatically in the cloud.

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 needs to be aware that some T-SQL features are simply not available.
• The programmatic access to server, trace flags, hardware from within Azure SQL Database is taken away (for a good reason).
• No SQL Agent so your jobs need to be orchestrated differently.
• The maximum concurrent logins maybe an unexpected problem.
• Sudden disconnects.
• The developers and admin must study the capacity and tier usage limits https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-subscription-service-limits otherwise some errors or even transaction aborts never seen before can occur.
• Only one Latin Collation choice.
• There is no way to debug T-SQL ( a big drawback in my point of view).

Incentivized

This is best solution as a DBA one could expect from a service provider and as a cloud service, it removes all your hassles.

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

The interfaces are intuitive once you are familiar with all the functions. The ability to use different tools to interact with the platform, such as directly via a browser or code editors such as VS Code or Visual Studio is a great option and allows for integrating withn the project and other testing and developing tools.

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 give the support a high rating simply because every time we've had issues or questions, representatives were in contact with us quickly. Without fail, our issues/questions were handled in a timely matter. That kind of response is integral when client data integrity and availability is in question. There is also a wealth of documentation for resolving issues on your own.

Incentivized

SAP BW / 4HANA and SAP IQ are both used for warehouse; with quick consultations for business analysis and that allows us to obtain dashboards and KPIs efficiently. SAP IQ is columnar and SAP BW / 4HANA immemorial. SAP BW / 4HANA was selected for the response speed of the queries since it saves the information in cache.

Incentivized

We moved away from Oracle and NoSQL because we had been so reliant on them for the last 25 years, the pricing was too much and we were looking for a way to cut the cord. Snowflake is just too up in the air, feels like it is soon to be just another line item to add to your Azure subscription. Azure was just priced right, easy to migrate to and plenty of resources to hire to support/maintain it. Very easy to learn, too.

Incentivized

• with SAP BW/4HANA's ability to store historical data and provide trends data for analysis, it supports business to make strategic decisions based on not only current data but also with historical data from several years in the past. It has helped to improve the accuracy
• with automated process chains for data loading and automated support to fix common errors, with support for automated data cleansing, the operational cost has reduced a lot for the business
• BW being the Single source of truth for the reporting eliminates the ambiguity in reporting by different business area.

Incentivized

• Perfect for small and medium databases, being very cost effective.
• As a Platform as a Service, there is no concern about patches, upgrades and end of life.
• Be aware of security and network capabilities. The service cannot run in the VNET as Azure Virtual Machines do.