SIT Hyderabad: Notes from the session on ABAP in HANA

Hi all SCN members,

In this blog I would like to mention the key points that I have jotted down in the technical session happened at SIT, Hyderabad on ABAP IN HANA by Sundaresan Krishnamurthy from SAPLABS. This 30 minutes was absolute enjoyment for all ABAPers, all credits to the presenter. It was again another useful session for all the attendees. Sundaresan was awarded with the winner award for his presentation on this session.

Introduction:

ABAP in HANA is upcoming and one hot topic in the SAP domain. Though HANA also playing a significant role in other fields of SAP its role in ABAP is immeasurable. In this blog I will be explaining in brief about the different aspects and role of HANA in ABAP.

Role of ABAP for development on HANA:

It basically deals with the following aspects,

• SAP business Suite: it concentrates mainly on how customer can optimize and develop more applications.
• SAP Net weaver BW: it concentrates on updation aspects.
• New Application: concentrates on developing new applications.

Advantages of ABAP in HANA:

1. Deeper and better integration with real time data access.
2. New tools to detect optimization potential.
3. Delightful user experience.
4. New possibilities to build applications.
5. Real time analysis.
6. ABAP in eclipse (develop like never before).

ABAP code benefits from SAP HANA:

1. SAP HANA platform is a complete relational database, hence no problem in using same code.
2. Custom codes must be taken care during transition.
3. Optimization potential will be high and transparent. That is fast data access and presence of optimized statements.
4. In memory computing.
5. Programming is near data base.
6. HANA specific features are used.
7. No message checks happen during transition.

CODE PUSHDOWN:

This is the main concept that explains the HANA functionality.

Usually in ABAP, data is transformed into code and then calculations happen alternatively in HANA the code is transformed into Data. This concept is called CODE PUSHDOWN.

Code pushdown need not necessarily be above example alone. A simple select query when transformed from SELECT SINGLE into SELECT FOR ALL ENTRIES also comes under CODE PUSHDOWN.

General Points:

• In ABAP coding is sequential where as in HANA coding is parallel.
• For getting started with HANA, ABAP 7.4 trial is used as virtual appliance.
• During transition select query based on index will automatically get deleted, hence no index in picture.
• As far as open SQL is concerned extended join support is provided.
• Support for literals. For e.g. till now in ABAP select statements we have only fields which should be present either in structure or in table but with HANA even constants can be present in select statements.

SQL MONITOR- The tool of HANA:

• This is an important tool that customer must be provided first incase he need to use HANA.
• The T-Code used for SQL tool monitor is SQLM.
• This tool is mainly used to analyze the code and check for its effectiveness.
• There is another transaction used namely SWLT which mainly uses ABAP test cockpit to prioritize which line of code is used more.
• In general it is similar to our ST05 with a difference that ST05 gives the trace for the entire code in the order in which it is executed but SQLM gives the trace on the basis of codes that are used more.
• In short SQLM can serve as an input to ST05.

TAKEAWAYS:

1. ABAP is and will continue to be basis for applications.
2. ABAP 7.4 facilitates leveraging which is a SAP HANA feature.
3. SAP HANA offer many new possibilities for ABAP based applications.
4. HANA deals only with INSERT statements with database.
5. Right time to get started with ABAP in HANA.

Conclusion:

The session actually gave me agood idea on what is HANA and what role does ABAP has on it. Thanks to the presenter such efforts with demo and explanations which made the subject more interesting.

Hope I shared all the content that was taught in the session, please feel free to correct for any mistakes. Question and answer session actually made the session more interesting.

Hats off to Sundaresan for this wonderful session.

Thanks for reading the blog 🙂 🙂   Hope you found it useful 🙂

Note: For more information about the happenings in SIT Hyderabad please read the below blog 🙂

http://scn.sap.com/community/events/inside-track/blog/2014/02/24/sit-hyderabad-an-overview-on-the-technical-track

LETS LEARN SHARE AND COLLABRATE 🙂 🙂 🙂

Thanks and Regards,

Satish kumar Balasubramanian