ABAP_to_the_Future

15
ABAP Programming for SAP HANA
how ABAP can be used to work with SAP HANA to make the most out of the new
opportunities provided.
The biggest change SAP HANA brings to ABAP programming is the way that you
access data in database ta bles. SAP HANA brings the new concept of code pushdown,
which is moving business logic out of the application server into the database.
This concept scares a lot of ABAP programmers, because they fear it will
impact their jobs. Because this concept has the most significant impact on ABAP
developers, the majority of the chapter is devoted to it. Section 15.1 introduces
you to the basic concept of code pushdown. Then, Section 15.2 and Section 15.3
explains the two ways code pushdown is accomplished. The first is top-down
development (the process of creating ar tifacts in ABAP and replicating them in
SAP HANA), which is fairly clearly the approach all ABAP programmers will use
eventually when using ABAP to control what SAP HANA does. The second is bottom-up
development (the process of crea ting artifacts in SAP HANA and calling
them from ABAP), which is already being discouraged by SAP—but this chapter
will look at it anyway, because some companies are not yet on a high enough
level to do the top-down approach. The discussion of code pushdown is rounded
off in Section 15.4, which explains how to identify code that should be pushed
down to the database.
Finally, the chapter concludes with Section 15.5, which offers a discussion of a
number of other ways in which SAP HANA will affect your ABAP programming:
changes not related to the idea of code pushdown but important nonetheless.
SAP HANA Being Fast Is Not the Point
When it comes to the benefits of SAP HANA, it could be said that SAP marketing has
been prioritizing the wrong message. What yo u hear about is the fact that queries run
10,000 times faster on SAP HANA—hence th e “10,000 club” that SAP talks about in
conferences referring to companies that have such benefits. But is that what SAP HANA
is all about?
The truth is that if a report takes ages to execute, then people are used to setting up
such reports to run overnight and logging on the next morning to have a look at them.
With SAP HANA, they run in seconds, so you could run them all throughout the day if
you wanted—but are people going to do this? Is just doing the exact same thing as
before really fast actually a benefit? SAP would say there has to be some sort of behavior
change as well: companies, by which we mean the individuals in the companies, have to
take advantage of the new capabilities by actually doing something they were not doing
before.
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