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BigQuery vs SAP Business Warehouse comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Dec 18, 2024

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

BigQuery
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
3rd
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
43
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SAP Business Warehouse
Ranking in Cloud Data Warehouse
15th
Average Rating
7.8
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
26
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2026, in the Cloud Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of BigQuery is 7.4%, up from 6.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP Business Warehouse is 2.4%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud Data Warehouse Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
BigQuery7.4%
SAP Business Warehouse2.4%
Other90.2%
Cloud Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

Luís Silva - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Technical Lead at a consultancy with 201-500 employees
Handles large data sets efficiently and offers flexible data management capabilities
The features I find most valuable in this solution are the ability to run and handle large data sets in a very efficient way with multiple types of data, relational as SQL data. It is kind of difficult to explain, but structured data and the ability to handle large data sets are key features. The data integration capabilities in BigQuery were, in fact, an issue at the beginning. There are two types of integrations. As long as integration is within Google, it is pretty simple. When you start to try to connect external clients to that data, it becomes more complex. It is not related to BigQuery, it is related to Google security model, which is not easy to manage. I would not call it an integration issue of BigQuery, I would call it an integration issue of Google security model.
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

"One of the most significant advantages lies in the decoupling of storage and compute which allows to independently scale storage and compute resources, with the added benefit of extremely cost-effective storage akin to object storage solutions."
"It's a stable, reliable solution."
"BigQuery allows for very fast access, and it is efficient in handling large datasets compared to other SQL databases."
"The product's most valuable features include its scalability and the ability to handle complex queries on large datasets."
"The query tool is scalable and allows for petabytes of data."
"The main thing I like about BigQuery is storage. We did an on-premise BigQuery migration with trillions of records. Usually, we have to deal with insufficient storage on-premises, but in BigQuery, we don't get that because it's like cloud storage, and we can have any number of records. That is one advantage. The next major advantage is the column length. We have some limits on column length on-premises, like 10,000, and we have to design it based on that. However, with BigQuery, we don't need to design the column length at all. It will expand or shrink based on the records it's getting. I can give you a real-life example based on our migration from on-premises to GCP. There was a dimension table with a general number of records, and when we queried that on-premises, like in Apache Spark or Teradata, it took around half an hour to get those records. In BigQuery, it was instant. As it's very fast, you can get it in two or three minutes. That was very helpful for our engineers. Usually, we have to run a query on-premises and go for a break while waiting for that query to give us the results. It's not the case with BigQuery because it instantly provides results when we run it. So, that makes the work fast, it helps a lot, and it helps save a lot of time. It also has a reasonable performance rate and smart tuning. Suppose we need to perform some joins, BigQuery has a smart tuning option, and it'll tune itself and tell us the best way a query can be done in the backend. To be frank, the performance, reliability, and everything else have improved, even the downtime. Usually, on-premise servers have some downtime, but as BigQuery is multiregional, we have storage in three different locations. So, downtime is also not getting impacted. For example, if the Atlantic ocean location has some downtime, or the server is down, we can use data that is stored in Africa or somewhere else. We have three or four storage locations, and that's the main advantage."
"This solution is highly scalable."
"The solution's reporting, dashboard, and out-of-the-box capabilities match exactly our requirements."
"Technical support is good, and they were able to assist us in some specific issues we were experiencing."
"BW is our bread and butter."
"My advice would be if you have a data block and if you really want a big solution on the reporting side of it with slicing and dicing, definitely go ahead with BW when it comes to SAP related data."
"The features that I have found most valuable are its capabilities to connect to Excel and to slice and dice."
"The fact that it can integrate with Microsoft Excel is the solution's most valuable feature."
"SAP Business Warehouse is a scalable solution."
"The most useful feature is definitely the speed."
"The product is very stable."
 

Cons

"We would like to be able to calibrate the solution to run on top of a raw file."
"The initial setup could be improved making it easier to deploy."
"The price is a bit high but the technology is worth it."
"It would be beneficial to integrate additional tools, particularly from a business intelligence perspective."
"I understand that Snowflake has made some improvements on its end to further reduce costs, so I believe BigQuery can catch up."
"It would be better if BigQuery didn't have huge restrictions. For example, when we migrate from on-premises to on-premise, the data which handles all ebook characters can be handled on-premise. But in BigQuery, we have huge restrictions. If we have some symbols, like a hash or other special characters, it won't accept them. Not in all cases, but it won't accept a few special characters, and when we migrate, we get errors. We need to use Regexp or something similar to replace that with another character. This isn't expected from a high-range technology like BigQuery. It has to adapt all products. For instance, if we have a TV Showroom, the TV symbol will be there in the shop name. Teradata and Apache Spark accept this, but BigQuery won't. This is the primary concern that we had. In the next release, it would be better if the query on the external table also had cache. Right now, we are using a GCS bucket, and in the native table, we have cache. For example, if we query the same table, it won't cost because it will try to fetch the records from the cached result. But when we run queries on the external table a number of times, it won't be cached. That's a major drawback of BigQuery. Only the native table has the cache option, and the external table doesn't. If there is an option to have an external table for cache purposes, it'll be a significant advantage for our organization."
"I noticed recently it's more expensive now."
"I am unsure of the scalability because I need to test it with a bigger project."
"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."
"Integration with SAP Business Warehouse's ETL tools is not straightforward."
"They should reduce the product’s installation package size for easier downloading."
"SAP Business Warehouse could improve by having more out-of-the-box use cases to cover more business types or operations."
"The visualization should be improved, as well as the dashboards and advanced analytics."
"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."
"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."
"A few things which are missing include the visualization of reports. That's where your costs and licensing become heavy. When it comes to this database compared Microsoft Warehouse, it's an expensive solution."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The platform is inexpensive."
"1 TB is free of cost monthly. If you use more than 1 TB a month, then you need to pay 5 dollars extra for each TB."
"The solution is pretty affordable and quite cheap in comparison to PDP or Cloudera."
"Price-wise, I think that is very reasonable."
"Its cost structure operates on a pay-as-you-go model."
"BigQuery is inexpensive."
"The pricing is adaptable, ensuring that organizations can tailor their usage and costs based on their specific requirements and configurations within the Google Cloud Platform."
"We are above the free threshold, so we are paying around 40 euros per month for BigQuery."
"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."
"It's moderately expensive, but definitely has its branding and price value for it."
"The license for SAP Business Warehouse is paid yearly, and there's no extra cost in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"The solution is quite expensive."
"Overall, the pricing is not fixed and is 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."
"SAP Business Warehouse licensing is a bit expensive compared to other products in the market."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Media Company
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Healthcare Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business13
Midsize Enterprise9
Large Enterprise20
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BigQuery?
I believe the cost of BigQuery is competitive versus the alternatives in the market, but it can become expensive if the tool is not used properly. It is on a per-consumption basis, the billing, so ...
What needs improvement with BigQuery?
With what I have seen in BigQuery, I had some response times problems, but then it is an analytical database and not a transactional database, so it comes with eventual consistency. I cannot have e...
What is your primary use case for BigQuery?
We are mostly dealing with Google solutions such as BigQuery, NoSQL, SQL analytical database, secrets manager, and most of the serverless infrastructure as well, databases. I run SQL queries on Big...
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

BQ
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
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 BigQuery vs. SAP Business Warehouse and other solutions. Updated: April 2026.
893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.