When SAP HANA Unites ABAP– The Best of Both Worlds

ABAP is the foundation for numerous SAP applications, having a wide range of functionality and features to create powerful business solutions. Likewise, SAP HANA also provides an opportunity to introduce advanced, sophisticated technologies. Using support package stacks like SPS 05 for SAP NetWeaver 7.4; this technology has brought SAP HANA and ABAP together, having features that allow developers to influence the best of both these technologies both in custom development projects and their existing applications. A globally available service delivered, SPS 05 offers several new artifacts, which ABAP developers can use for pushing codes to SAP HANA, thus bringing innovation to applications at different abstraction levels. These prospects have increased the number of professionals opting for SAB ABAP HANA training.    

Open SQL Database-Independent Programming

In SAP ABAP environments, Open SQL provides proper abstraction levels to database processing, which enables ABAP programs to perform operation on SAP-supported database. The major advantage of this application is its database platform independence feature. Addition, its integration into ABAP language with runtime environment by internal tables and strong SAP NetWeaver Application Server support with table buffering is an addition. SAP ABAP source editor and SQL trace tool transaction ST05 can be used to facilitate Open SQL programming at the time of application design mode. It is also excellent for tracing and monitoring SQL execution in execution mode.

SAP ABAP HANA is an influential program that requires proper training. With Open SQL, ABAP developers can abstract from the underlying database. While this builds a foundation for the SAP Business Suite, traditional styles of programming used by ABAP developers include some behaviors that may be challenging when big data is concerned.

SAP HANA

For SAP NetWeaver 7.4, SPS 02 was shipped in 2013. It provides users with an option to choose SAP HANA as their database for SAP Customer Relationship Management, SAP Supply Chain Management, and SAP ERP. Developers could use specificartifacts like calculation views and analytical views, in ABAP programs, both existing and new, with certain amount of reengineering in their existing programs only to make sure that the logic executes where it belongs semantically – to accelerate the process of data processing remarkably.

With some major SAP applications like SAP Business Suite and SAP Business Warehouse optimized for SAP HANA now, besides supporting conventional database platforms, developers need an innovative approach to combine SAP HANA processing power with semantic layers in ABAP, which won’t be bound to any particular platform. In order to meet the need, SAP ABAP language team renovated its Open SQL architecture to offer a fresh Open SQL Syntax that can seamlessly integrate into ABAP environment as conventional Open SQL. Moreover, it also provides hints to the primary layers of database for optimal execution.

The Latest Open SQL

SAP NetWeaver 7.4 SPS 05 also introduced an innovative syntax format for Open SQL that includes excellent support for enhance string expression, comma separated lists, host variable definition in a standard manner, and lesser restrictions in case of joins.

The new syntax is much syntactically closer to SQL 92 standard than conventional Open SQL that enables better execution efficiency. It serves as the most important basis for definition of all core data service views that are also a SQL based data modeling. The definition feature includes SPS 05. From the conventional loop processing using SELECT…ENDSELECT helps developers achieve push-down code efficiency as join query is also passed on to the primary SAP HANA database to ensure full-speed-in-memory computation.

Open SQL SPS 08 Enhancements

Besides referring to all columns of each row enhancements for the SPS 08, also includes new and varied SQL expressions with inline declarations. It further includes parameterized core data service view consumption.

ABAP data modeling involved defining and even managing views of data on ABAP server with the help of tools like ABAP dictionary in ABAP Workbench. Considering the paradigm shift of data movement operations to database in memory processing, SAP has introduced CDS (core data services) with SPS 05 for SAP NetWeaver 2.7.

Conclusion

Core data services, Open SQL and ABAP managed database procedures provide excellent abstractions to enable SAP ABAP certification holders to enjoy the benefits of both SAP HANA high-speed-in-memory execution with established ABAP lifecycle and runtime model. These tools include ABAP in Eclipse that can help you to test and prototype these artifacts with shorterturnaround cycles.