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Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse vs SAP Business Warehouse comparison

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Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Microsoft Parallel Data War...
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
40
Ranking in other categories
Data Warehouse (9th)
SAP Business Warehouse
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
Cloud Data Warehouse (15th)
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2254953 - PeerSpot reviewer
Service Desk Administrator at a real estate/law firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Virtual machines have handled large data and supported growth but pricing still needs improvement
I believe the product is pretty fast. When I have used it, it is handy. The integration with other Azure products is good and integrates well. Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse's security measures help ensure our sensitive data protection during analysis through measures such as encryption. Its scalability is impressive as it scales up and down really well. We go from a couple of users to tons of users all the time, and it scales and handles things really well. One of the major benefits with this product is that it's Microsoft, which is one of the best ones, and it's just plug and play.
VishnuReddy2 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consulting Enterprise Architect at R2V2.ai
Have encountered complexity with programming language while working on large-scale data integration and have experienced improved governance and reporting
The only complexity I find with the product is the programming language; people find it harder, but once you know the language, it's not that difficult. Regarding the future of SAP Business Warehouse, I would to see added features that simplify the product very well now. They are coming up with a terminology called SAP BDC where they are consolidating their tools, SAP Data Sphere for integration and SAP BW for the ETL and warehousing parts, and SAP Analytics Cloud. They are packaging these three features and calling it Business Data Cloud; they are fully coming on the cloud. We have to wait and watch; they have been speaking about BW/4HANA for quite some time now, but the customers or clients I work with are not finding great interest and it was seen as a candidate for evaluation. I have seen people looking at the latest technologies who are already on cloud who started building from scratch on cloud, such as Snowflake or Databricks, which can process very huge amounts of data and also address unstructured data, where SAP lags behind in cases where there is a need to bring in unstructured data. I have worked with SAP Data Intelligence, which earlier used to be called SAP Data Hub. The unstructured data is not greatly handled in SAP at this point in time.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Collecting the data through SSIS packages from different sources and putting them all in one data repository is the most powerful thing. While others have this feature, they don't have the simplicity or ease of use when getting a resource and knowing everything about it."
"SQL Data Warehouse provides our organization with a way to access all corporate data in a uniform way."
"Tools like the BI and SAS are excellent."
"The UI is very simple and functional for my clients, most of the clients that use the solution are not experts."
"​It has allowed fast daily loads and analysis of millions of rows of data, which eventually moved to near real-time.​"
"The stability of the solution is good."
"It is a very stable database."
"The solution's integration is good."
"Getting high volume data is most valuable for us; it is really fast and it has great integration with SAP ERP or a non-SAP system."
"The most valuable feature is the new version of Business Explorer Analyzer, which is a very good version because there are a lot of analytical features of Excel also."
"The most useful feature is definitely the speed."
"We switched to SAP because the solution is more comfortable to work with."
"The most valuable aspect of the solution is the integration with SAP ERP."
"In terms of stability, comparatively, the solution is quite stable."
"Technical support is good, and they were able to assist us in some specific issues we were experiencing."
"The features that I have found most valuable are its capabilities to connect to Excel and to slice and dice."
 

Cons

"There were scalability issues in that there is a limit to 32 concurrent queries."
"They need to incorporate a machine learning engine."
"This solution would be improved with an option for in-memory data analysis."
"It requires significant infrastructure expertise to implement."
"There could be improvements on the cost side of Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse because it is still considered to be quite expensive by a lot of users, and many companies are not interested in solutions with parallel data warehousing due to this expense."
"It could be made more user-friendly for business users which would increase the user base."
"It is expensive. SQL Data Warehouse is not supported by all versions of SQL Server such as the Express version and therefore becomes unavailable to many limiting its acquisition and use."
"The reporting for certain types of data needs to be improved."
"The advanced structuring can be complicated and the interface is not very intuitive."
"You can start quickly but, when you have to get a little more detailed, when you have to change something, when you have to solve problems, it's not that easy. It's easy to start but evolving is not that easy."
"In the next release, my suggestion would be to have user-friendly interfaces and performance issues be addressed."
"The big minuses are its not being user friendly."
"What I'd like improved in SAP Business Warehouse is its setup. It could be more flexible, and it could be a configuration-based setup."
"The way the data is stored is kind of rigid in SAP BW as a product. It could be more flexible so that when we are designing a solution, we can design our own data structures and try to improve performance."
"There are a lot of things that could be improved especially in terms of data cleansing, data management, data lineage, etc. The solution needs to offer more flexibility in terms of formulas and the query designer."
"From a support perspective, SAP Business Warehouse is quite a complex module."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Technical support is an additional fee and is expensive."
"The solution is cost-effective."
"All the features that we use do not require any additional subscription or yearly fees."
"They offer an annual subscription. The pricing depends on the size of the environments."
"The tool could be expensive if we need to manage a lot of data."
"Microsoft has an agreement with the government in our country, so our customers get their licensing costs from the Ministry. Whenever we work with any government, company, or government institute, which is mainly what we are doing, that license comes directly from the Ministry of Technology and Information."
"The solution's pricing is fairly decent for organizations with huge data sizes."
"I think the program is well-priced compared to the other offerings that are out in the market."
"The license for SAP Business Warehouse is paid yearly, and there's no extra cost in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"The licensing cost for SAP Business Warehouse depends on your revenue. Its licensing structure is a little bit complicated. The more your revenue is, the higher the price, but SAP does have different pricing structures for various companies. For small businesses, licensing isn't based on revenue, but for big companies, it's revenue-based. There's some agreement regarding pricing for huge companies, so it's different, and SAP Business Warehouse pricing isn't fixed. On a scale of one to ten, I'm rating the licensing cost for SAP Business Warehouse as five because it's very high. As your revenue grows, your licensing cost also increases, so you have to factor that in when calculating your cost."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"It's quite pricey. SAP changed its pricing policy, so they give you one engine and then you have to buy everything next to it, like MSS, the BPC licenses, and everything else."
"I would not recommend it to small-scale companies. The price is too much."
"It's moderately expensive, but definitely has its branding and price value for it."
"SAP Business Warehouse licensing is a bit expensive compared to other products in the market."
"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
22%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Construction Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business16
Midsize Enterprise6
Large Enterprise22
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse?
The pricing could be better; I think it actually just went up.
What is your primary use case for Microsoft Parallel Data Warehouse?
The basic use case for us is virtual machines. In real estate, we use it for our operations. They handle large data sets well, and the performance is good during those times.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP Business Warehouse?
The pricing for SAP Business Warehouse is on the expensive side. I am not sure about the current costing model as such. In my experience on cloud, I did not use BW HANA Cloud. I used the cloud prod...
What needs improvement with SAP Business Warehouse?
The only complexity I find with the product is the programming language; people find it harder, but once you know the language, it's not that difficult. Regarding the future of SAP Business Warehou...
What is your primary use case for SAP Business Warehouse?
I am using SAP Business Warehouse in my organization for data warehousing as well as an ETL tool. Integration with SAP Business Warehouse's ETL tools is not straightforward. Integration with SAP ER...
 

Also Known As

Microsoft PDW, SQL Server Data Warehouse, Microsoft SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse, MS Parallel Data Warehouse
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Auckland Transport, Erste Bank Group, Urban Software Institute, NJVC, Sheraton Hotels and Resorts, Tata Steel Europe
Medtronic, Cirque du Soleil, Antarc, B&G Manufacturing, EarlySense, eBay, Ferrero, James Austin Company, Lenovo, Sagem, RAK Ceramics, Vodafone
Find out what your peers are saying about Snowflake Computing, Oracle, Teradata and others in Data Warehouse. Updated: September 2026.
917,433 professionals have used our research since 2012.