Preface

SAP HANA turns five! Hard to believe, but this technology has been on the market for almost five years now. During this time, its use potential has increased significantly, from an in-memory database for data marts, which supplements SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW) and the SAP Business Suite, to all types of data warehouse applications, and a platform for analytical and transactional systems. Today, SAP HANA is a complete, high-end database for all SAP applications and, at the same time, an innovation platform for completely new types of real-time applications (in the area of healthcare, for example).

I had the opportunity to accompany this rapid development, from its origins in the SAP BW environment right up until the present day, and to do so from the perspective of an internal user. Never before had I witnessed the energy within the walls of SAP that greeted the arrival of SAP HANA. In addition, the best thing about it is that this is just the beginning. Anyone who has experienced this enthusiasm from customers, partners, and employees—or seen the wealth of ideas for developing completely new applications for the software—will know exactly what I mean.

SAP BW (since the end of 2011) and the SAP Business Suite (since the start of 2013) can now run productively on SAP HANA. Porting and optimizing these systems for the in-memory database technology was one of SAP’s key strategic projects in recent years. In parallel, and as an additional support for this project, we developed a new SAP NetWeaver release—SAP NetWeaver 7.4—in mid-2012. As part of this development, we systematically optimized ABAP technology for use with SAP HANA and ported the Java-based SAP NetWeaver hubs (for example, SAP Enterprise Portal and SAP Business Process Management) to SAP HANA in particular, thus giving each and every customer the opportunity to run SAP NetWeaver productively on SAP HANA—a key milestone for not only SAP but our customers as well. In the meantime, SAP NetWeaver 7.4 is used widely. The presentation of the new SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA (SAP S/4HANA) in early 2015 laid the foundation for the next generation of SAP business applications with full utilization of the in-memory technology.

The new features in SAP NetWeaver AS ABAP 7.4 support the application developers at SAP in optimizing existing ABAP programs for SAP HANA and implementing completely new applications based on SAP HANA. Of course, our customers and partners can also benefit from these opportunities. A nondisruptive way of migrating existing business processes to SAP HANA, while at the same time developing completely new applications, now exists for the entire ABAP ecosystem.

In this book, Thorsten Schneider, Christiaan Swanepoel, Eric Westenberger, and Hermann Gahm describe the importance of SAP HANA for ABAP development, as well as the new opportunities presented by ABAP 7.4 in the context of in-memory database technology. Thorsten, Chris, Eric, and Hermann not only discuss program acceleration as a result of moving the calculation logic to the database but also the innovative features that SAP HANA makes available to you—thus making this book a must-read for every ABAP developer.

I hope that you enjoy reading this book.

Andreas Wesselmann
Senior Vice President SAP Products & Innovation Technology,
SAP SE