Evaluation of ABAP for SAP HANA

ABAP can access SAP SAP Netweaver Application SAP Netweaver Application
HANA(side by side scenarios) server ABAP 7.31 Server ABAP 7.4
<SPS05 >=SPS05
ABAP Can run on SAP HANA Optimized ABAP for SAP HANA
SAP HANA As Secondary Data SAP HANA as Primary data
base base
Bottom-up approach Top down approach
External views CDS views
Database procedure proxy AMDP
In Resume 2014,2015 and even 2016 and After
now also if we work in
secondary data base

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.