ABAP for HANA and "Code Push-Down"

[JensWeiler]

With the brand new NW AS ABAP 7.4 SP5 we are adding a new possibility for ABAP Developers to leverage HANA capabilities ( New ABAP for HANA features in SAP NW 7.4 SP5 ).

 

The whole ABAP for HANA story began last year with our first release of NW AS ABAP 7.4 introducing a new coding paradigm (at least for ABAP): “code pushdown”.



 

So what does this mean?

Code pushdown means delegating data intense calculations to the database layer. It does not mean push ALL calculations to the database, but only those that make sense. An easy example is if you want to calculate the amount of all positions of invoices. You should not select all positions of those invoices and calculate the sum in a loop. This can be easily done by using an aggregation function (here SUM()) on the database.

 

However, pre ABAP 7.4 releases only provided very limited support for such an approach. In the 7.4 SP2 release we did our first step to overcome this limitation. We introduced new ABAP artifacts to consume HANA views and procedures in ABAP: The “Bottom-Up approach”.

 

Only use this in needed cases

 

Sounds perfect? Yes, but unfortunately it has some drawbacks. First of all, as a developer, you have to work in both worlds (HANA and ABAP). This requires a database user, which alone is quiet tricky in some enterprise environments. You also have to keep the HANA and ABAP artifacts in sync and take care of the lifecycle management.

 

With the new SP5 release we are taking the next step to enabling code pushdown with ABAP for SAP HANA: The “Top-Down approach”. It is based on your feedback and our own experience using ABAP for SAP HANA. It enables developers to continue working in their ABAP environment and still have similar possibilities to leverage the power of SAP HANA.

 

Recommended approach

 

This approach comes with a huge bag of goodies, like writing SQL Script or being able to create database views with new join and aggregation capabilities directly in ABAP. We will describe these features in detail in more blogs that will follow soon.

 

By the way: this does not mean you do not need the Bottom-Up approach anymore. There are still special cases which you won’t be able to tackle with these new “Top-down”-features. But we are continuing to enrich the ABAP possibilities with every SP. Stay tuned.

 

If you are interested in those new features there is are already great videos available in our YouTube Channel: ABAP for SAP HANA - YouTube

 

Cheers

 

Jens