Mastering CDS Views in SAP ABAP on HANA
Three years ago, I was a confident classic ABAP developer with eight years of experience. I knew SELECT statements, internal tables, and BAPIs inside out. Then a client asked me a single question that changed everything: “Can you optimise this report? It takes four hours to run.” That one question sent me down a path that completely transformed my career — and my salary. This is the honest story of what switching to SAP ABAP on HANA actually looks like from the inside. My Wake-Up Call: When Classic ABAP Was Not Enough I remember opening that report’s code for the first time. It was textbook classic ABAP — nested loops, SELECT inside a loop, massive internal tables being built record by record. The developer who wrote it was not incompetent. In fact, on an older Oracle or SQL Server database, that code was perfectly reasonable. But this client had just migrated to S/4HANA. And on HANA, that code was not just slow — it was an insult to the database engine sitting underneath ...
