Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Microsoft SQL Server is a great RDBMS and meets all of our requirements. If you need a stable DB platform to support your line of a business application you'll be well served. Licensing costs are far cheaper, more portable and a lot more user friendly than Oracle. Product support and security patches from Microsoft are strong.
Read full review Pros High speed data warehouse regardless of data volumes. Excellent integration with SAP systems and Data sets. Simplified data modelling due to columnar data base. Read full review Easy to configure and use with Visual Studio and Dot Net Easy integration with MSBI to perform data analysis Data Security Easy to understand and use Very easy to export database and tables in the form of SQL query or a script Read full review Cons 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. Read full review The import/export process can be tricky to follow with lots of steps and could be better for importing flat files Obtaining help from Microsoft is cumbersome and often other internet sources are better and quicker The documentation is not great and again it's generally better to obtain help elsewhere if needed Read full review Likelihood to Renew We understand that the Microsoft SQL Server will continue to advance, offering the same robust and reliable platform while adding new features that enable us, as a software center, to create a superior product. That provides excellent performance while reducing the hardware requirements and the total cost of ownership of our solution.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review SQL Server mostly 'just works' or generates error messages to help you sort out the trouble. You can usually count on the product to get the job done and keep an eye on your potential mistakes. Interaction with other Microsoft products makes operating as a Windows user pretty straight forward. Digging through the multitude of dialogs and wizards can be a pain, but the answer is usually there somewhere.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Its does not have outages.
Read full review Performance SSAS data cubes may some time slow down your Excel reports.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review We managed to handle most of our problems by looking into Microsoft's official documentation that has everything explained and almost every function has an example that illustrates in detail how a particular functionality works. Just like PowerShell has the ability to show you an example of how some cmdlet works, that is the case also here, and in my opinion, it is a very good practice and I like it.
Read full review In-Person Training It was good
Read full review Online Training very hands on and detailed training
Read full review Implementation Rating Other than SQL taking quite a bit of time to actually install there are no problems with installation. Even on hardware that has good performance SQL can still take close to an hour to install a typical server with management and reporting services.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review [Microsoft] SQL Server has a much better community and professional support and is overall just a more reliable system with Microsoft behind it. I've used
MySQL in the past and SQL Server has just become more comfortable for me and is my go to RDBMS.
Read full review Scalability SQL server does handle growing demands of a mid sized company.
Read full review Return on Investment 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 Read full review Increased accuracy - We went from multiple users having different versions of an Excel spreadsheet to a single source of truth for our reporting. Increased Efficiency - We can now generate reports at any time from a single source rather than multiple users spending their time collating data and generating reports. Improved Security - Enterprise level security on a dedicated server rather than financial files on multiple laptop hard drives. Read full review ScreenShots