Introduction

Excited to try out ABAP on HANA, I set up an Application Server (ABAP 7.02) in my local system. HANA One was set up in Amazon Web Services (AWS). My local machine had HANA Studio, HANA client installed, and was able to connect to HANA instance. Everything seemed to be going so well, until I tried accessing a table (SFLIGHT) from ABAP. I got an ABAP dump (DBIF_RSQL_TABLE_UNKNOWN) .

This article discusses how I was able to get around this issue, though this may not be the ideal solution.  But, to experiment with HANA tables, hopefully, this post will get you started.

Articles I followed to get through Pre-Requisites of this Post

Set up HANA developer edition on Amazon Web Services

Excellent  post by Juergen Schmerder on how to set up HANA in AWS cloud.

Get your own SAP HANA, developer edition on Amazon Web Services

Install Netweaver AS with ABAP 7.02

Excellent posts by John  Moy on how to set up Netweaver AS. My set up different in that, I did not use AWS, but my own local machine, running Windows 8 Professional (Hey.. it’s a monster Alienware machine designed for high performance, Gaming, Graphics and Development – It can run the Application Server J without any problems! )

Installing Trial SAP NetWeaver Gateway 2.0 SP04 with ABAP 7.02 on AWS – Part 1

Installing Trial SAP NetWeaver Gateway 2.0 SP04 with ABAP 7.02 on AWS – Part 2

Installing Trial SAP NetWeaver Gateway 2.0 SP04 with ABAP 7.02 on AWS – Part 3

Setting up ABAP on HANA

Very informative post by Thorsten Franz on configuring secondary database to access HANA. This post also includes importing SFLIGHT data into HANA instance.

Experience the Magic: How to Setup Your Own ABAP on HANA in the Cloud

The Problem

After instructing the ABAP program to use remote “SFLIGHT” connection, I tried executing the Z-report program.

SELECT * FROM SFLIGHT CONNECTION ('SFLIGHT')
           INTO TABLE lt_sflight

However, I promptly received a dump, stating that there was no table named “SFLIGHT”.

My DBCON table setup from SM30 (as detailed in Experience the Magic: How to Setup Your Own ABAP on HANA in the Cloud) was as follows:

A careful look at the HANA catalog tells us that SFLIGHT table is present inside SFLIGHT schema.

It should be noted that, at this time, there are no tables inside SYSTEM schema. Problem is, when we use the SFLIGHT DB connection (as configured in DBCON in screen shot above), the schema that is searched for table is the same as what is specified in “User Name”. So, in this case, when ABAP statement “SELECT * FROM SFLIGHT” is executed, the assumption is, SFLIGHT table is available within “SYSTEM” schema.

Failed Attempts to Solve the Problem

Set Up a new user named “SFLIGHT” in HANA, and configure DBCON to use this new UserID

Since it appeared that the “User Name” in DBCON should match the schema name, I decided to create a new user. However, this failed, because the schema name “SFLIGHT” was already present, as is shown in the screen shot of error message:

Use Fully Qualified Table Name in ABAP

In HANA using SQL script, we can fully qualify a table using “<Schema Name>.<Table Name>”. So, to access “SFLIGHT” table within SFLIGHT schema, I tried using the following SELECT statement:

SELECT * FROM ('SFLIGHT.SFLIGHT') CONNECTION ('SFLIGHT')
           INTO TABLE lt_sflight

While the above did compile, when running the report, I got the following ABAP Dump:

Solution/What Worked (For Now)…

The solution to this issue would be to be able to specify the fully qualified table name (including schema name), in this case, “SFLIGHT.SFLIGHT”, in the SELECT statement.

Since I was unable to do this, my next attempt was to copy the table SFLIGHT from its original schema (SFLIGHT), to SYSTEM schema. I used the following SQL Script:

As shown in the execution result, the script created the new table, and copied all the data into SYSTEM.SFLIGHT. Most of the entries in table have client ID (MANDT) set to 300. However, my application server after installation only had client “001” (I have very little BASIS knowledge…so, one of my TO DOs is to figure out how to set up other clients). There were indeed couple of entries with client ID = 001.

Now, for moment of truth…. I came back to the ABAP program. Here is the code that was executed:

REPORT  zgopal_hana_test.
DATA:
  lt_sflight TYPE TABLE OF  sflight,
  lr_salv    TYPE REF TO    cl_salv_table.
START-OF-SELECTION.
  SELECT * FROM sflight CONNECTION ('SFLIGHT')
           INTO TABLE lt_sflight
    .
  CALL METHOD cl_salv_table=>factory
    IMPORTING
      r_salv_table = lr_salv
    CHANGING
      t_table      = lt_sflight.
  lr_salv->display( ).

And here are the results:

The Begining….

While I was able to access data from HANA using ABAP, I am pretty sure, what I described here, is NOT a practical solution.

The question remains… “How do I access data from different schemas”?

But for now, with access to data, its a  step forward for me in terms of combining ABAP and power of HANA, esp for heavy data intensive calculations. It will be amazing to see all the computations being handled in HANA, and ABAP, PHP, Android, Joomla components, HTML5, iOS…etc receiving the computed result set….

How do I do it??? Well.. the search has begun, and with so many experts in SCN, I am sure its just a matter of time.