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Oracle Exadata vs SAP BW4HANA 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:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.6
Oracle Exadata users often break-even in 12-18 months, achieving up to 40% cost savings and notable performance improvements.
Sentiment score
7.7
SAP BW4HANA centralizes data, enhances productivity and insights, with ROI expected in three to five years.
The investment is good, which is why people choose this hardware.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.6
Oracle Exadata's service is praised for expertise and accessibility, though some users face delays and system navigation issues.
Sentiment score
5.6
SAP BW4HANA support receives mixed reviews, praised for technical assistance but criticized for variable response times and delays.
Exadata comes with a platinum gateway and comprehensive support, which often gets immediate attention with severity one cases.
In the meantime, I found solutions independently and provided two solutions to my client.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.6
Oracle Exadata is praised for scalability and efficiency but requires careful planning due to costs and complexity considerations.
Sentiment score
7.1
SAP BW4HANA provides strong scalability through horizontal and vertical scaling, with positive user feedback despite budgeting challenges.
Within a site, scalability is excellent.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
7.8
Oracle Exadata ensures high reliability with improved updates, minimal downtime, and strong fault tolerance despite early challenges.
Sentiment score
7.6
SAP BW4HANA is stable and reliable but faces scalability challenges with large datasets and needs more cloud-orientation.
Once installed, Exadata is very stable.
 

Room For Improvement

Oracle Exadata needs cost reductions, improved support, better integration, scalability, analytics, monitoring tools, and enhanced virtualization performance.
SAP BW4HANA struggles with complexity, integration issues, high costs, a steep learning curve, and limited customization and support.
There are minor areas where improvement is needed, such as making the user interface more user-friendly and enhancing configuration and customization options.
I cannot create an extended rack cluster with one node on one site and another node on a different site.
Integration needs improvement.
 

Setup Cost

Oracle Exadata's high initial costs are offset by enhanced performance, lower expenses, and enterprise consolidation benefits.
SAP BW4HANA is costly, with high migration and certification fees, affordable for large enterprises but expensive for smaller ones.
I would rate the price an eight on a scale from one to ten, indicating it is fairly expensive.
The certification cost for SAP BW4HANA in 2025 is expected to be one lakh forty thousand.
 

Valuable Features

Oracle Exadata enhances performance and efficiency with features like Smart Scan, automation, and high-speed integration, ensuring robust data management.
SAP BW4HANA offers flexible, efficient data management and real-time analytics, featuring user-friendly interfaces and strong integration with SAP ERP.
The most valuable features of Oracle Exadata are its high availability and cluster environment.
It also offers high backend speed between self-storage units and servers, which is beneficial for processing.
The best features include the ability to create data sources directly on tables, and perform mapping without creating info objects.
 

Categories and Ranking

Oracle Exadata
Ranking in Data Warehouse
2nd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
128
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
SAP BW4HANA
Ranking in Data Warehouse
9th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
43
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Data Warehouse category, the mindshare of Oracle Exadata is 17.4%, down from 19.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of SAP BW4HANA is 4.6%, down from 4.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Data Warehouse
 

Featured Reviews

Anand_Kumar - PeerSpot reviewer
A solid data warehouse for transactional data that needs to be priced more competitively
Since the product is an appliance, it is very costly. And in the current age, people are cautious about spending this amount of money on any of these types of backend products. Some use cases are in real-time, where all other databases are much faster, but if you talk about the data warehouse, business intelligence, and all other perspectives in the transactional world, Oracle has to reduce the cost. Otherwise, a customer wouldn't want to continue this. If the same thing can be done at half or one-third of the cost, why would people stay with Oracle? Oracle Exadata would not have great value in front of a CFO. Other solutions can guard your data and address security concerns. Security, volumetrics, and so on are also provided by other databases, which are not that costly. Apart from Exadata, Oracle has other tools for business intelligence and other things, which they add on top of Exadata when they're selling a general license. For example, the Vertica database, an HP data warehouse. They have come up with their own analytic engine within the database, which gives an edge for the client to use the data analytics engine as a part of their database. Exadata does not have an analytic engine. Even MySQL has some statistical tools within it. If Exadata integrates analytical tools, it will be good for them.
Csaba Grünblatt - PeerSpot reviewer
Performs all necessary data warehouse tasks and offers additional functionalities
SAP BW4HANA improved data reporting processes significantly. Performance on HANA database is good. Well-built data models ensure consistent and fast reporting. Reusable models enhance efficiency, even for SaaS services. In-memory computing, especially since HANA, has greatly improved performance in data analysis tasks. It eliminates the need for complex optimizations like creating indexes or aggregates. Queries that once took minutes now run in seconds, enabling real-time reporting, especially for SAP ECC on HANA. SAP BW4HANA's integration capabilities are streamlined with a simplified architecture and more virtual layers. You can directly load data into optimized layers, reducing the need for extra storage. The introduction of Open ODS Views allows for additional logic and master data inclusion, making integration faster and simpler. The learning curve for SAP BW4HANA is much faster now compared to ten years ago, thanks to abundant free resources like documentation, videos, blogs, and learning journeys provided by SAP. It is simpler to learn with these resources available compared to the past when you had to attend courses and rely on books. I would recommend SAP BW4HANA to users looking to implement it, especially if they want to keep their systems on-premise and already have SAP systems. Those with BW on HANA have two choices: BW4HANA or DataSphere, depending on their cloud strategy. If they are advanced in their cloud strategy and want to migrate off-premise, DataSphere is a good choice. However, for a robust solution on-premise or in a private cloud, BW4HANA is an excellent option. Overall, I would rate BW4HANA as a nine out of ten. It performs all necessary data warehouse tasks and offers additional functionalities. We use it traditionally, with complex transformations and models but with less emphasis on real-time processing and third-party sources.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
32%
Computer Software Company
12%
Government
6%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Manufacturing Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Retailer
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Oracle Exadata?
It is the best solution for OLTP and data warehousing.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Oracle Exadata?
The price is a major consideration. I would rate the price an eight on a scale from one to ten, indicating it is fairly expensive.
What needs improvement with Oracle Exadata?
We recently completed an extension of our storage space. There are minor areas where improvement is needed, such as making the user interface more user-friendly and enhancing configuration and cust...
What do you like most about SAP BW4HANA?
One significant advantage of SAP BW/4HANA is the direct integration with the SAP HANA database, providing seamless access to real-time analytics. Additionally, it enables real-time data integrati...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for SAP BW4HANA?
We have a broad licensing arrangement, which is expensive but worth it for sizeable businesses.
What needs improvement with SAP BW4HANA?
The interface could be more user-friendly, as we often need to do low-level coding to get things done.
 

Also Known As

No data available
SAP BW/4HANA
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

PayPal, EBS, Organic Food Retailer, Garmin, University of Minnesota, Major Semiconductor Company, Deutsche Bank, Starwood, Ziraat Bank, SK Telecom, and P&G.
Information Not Available
Find out what your peers are saying about Oracle Exadata vs. SAP BW4HANA and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
851,604 professionals have used our research since 2012.