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Infobright DB vs SAP Business Warehouse comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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

Infobright DB
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.3
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
Relational Databases Tools (34th), Data Warehouse (18th)
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

it_user708987 - PeerSpot reviewer
MySQL DBA at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees
Excellent reporting server that is compatible with MySQL
We ran into some quirks that Infobright had. We interacted with Infobright's support and were able to resolve them. There still are issues with data replication - Infobright is currently for one server (unless you buy the Infobright appliance). This would mean that redundancy is something you need to implement yourself.
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

"It has very amazing smart grid query feature for very fast aggregate queries across millions of rows"
"A valuable feature was the use of a columnar database for large, ever-growing, big datasets."
"It is very straightforward and easy to work with."
"The high compression and the relatively fast load for a free product."
"We now have multiple times faster queries in comparison to MS SQL."
"Infobright gave us the ability to avoid significant changes in our data structure and just use Infobright like BigDataMySql."
"ICE helped us improve the speed for the “group-by” query by 10x."
"The performance of ad hoc aggregation queries is superior to any RDBMS that I have used and I have used them all."
"The most useful feature is definitely the speed."
"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."
"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."
"Having the integration with the reporting tool which is provided by SAP is great."
"All our processes such as funds management, grant, payroll transactions are processed automatically through this system and BW helps to collect the data for analytic needs of the department users and board members."
"I like that it integrates to open-source."
"The real-time information is great."
"The most valuable feature of SAP Business Warehouse is its hybrid functionality, allowing users to leverage both SQL-based data warehouse capabilities from HANA and feature-based data warehousing from BW."
 

Cons

"On the contrary, we have switched back to the MS SSAS Tabular Model, because of pricing policy."
"When running a complex subquery, the system hangs without giving the user any response."
"We didn’t purchase the Enterprise Edition because it was too expensive for a product that wasn’t going to replace our main DWH database (Oracle), but was, somehow, only an addition for it."
"MPP, distributed processing!!! And better integration with Hadoop."
"There was no scalability at all. Infobright didn't permit any changes in tables."
"There still are issues with data replication - Infobright is currently for one server (unless you buy the Infobright appliance)."
"After all the re-work to our product to remove as much reliance on Infobright, and the extra hardware costs we had to absorb, there was definitely a negative return on investment."
"Only the data from the columns that reached 2GB will actually decrease. Other columns below 2GB in size do not leave the disk."
"I would for sure like to see a different end solution in order to read the data and attract internal users."
"SAP Business Warehouse could integrate better with other ETL tools."
"SAP Business Warehouse could improve by having more out-of-the-box use cases to cover more business types or operations."
"Areas for improvement in SAP Business Warehouse include enhancing scheduling and monitoring tools, as well as improving communication about hidden features to make them more accessible to users."
"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's a product that is at the end of life so they will not improve it anymore."
"The problem with BW, and the factor that differentiated it from the original BW, is that you only get limited functionality with your runtime license. So, you have to pay extra for extracting data."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Our pricing was based on server instances and it was actually very cheap compared to Oracle. I guess you get what you pay for."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"SAP Business Warehouse licensing is a bit expensive compared to other products in the market."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
19%
Construction Company
12%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Outsourcing Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Construction Company
10%
Healthcare Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise2
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business8
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise15
 

Questions from the Community

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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

Infobright
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

REZ-1, SonicWALL, IntegriChain, Fuseforward International Inc., Polystar, Live Rail, Mavenir Systems, JDSU Partners, Bango
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: June 2026.
902,417 professionals have used our research since 2012.