Introduction to BI ABAP
Welcome folks to the BI ABAP tutorial series where we understand what SAP ABAP is, what it means with respect to SAP BW and how difficult it is to pick up.
The pre-requisite of this course is the knowledge of SAP BW. If you do not know BW yet or if you aren’t confident on it, I recommend that you go through the BW on HANA tutorial.
Coding languages induce fear in many and BW tends to involve a lot of customizations and routines to make sure your data flows are in line with your client’s needs. In a sea of competition around, your career graph as a BW consultant just might saturate without the ABAP knowledge. Having heard countless times from interview candidates that they had an ABAP consultant for the customization work, let me just say the probabilities of them getting hired reduce greatly.
So what exactly is ABAP? ABAP stands for Advanced Business Application Programming, originally Allgemeiner Berichts-Aufbereitungs-Prozessor, German for “general report creation processor”. Don’t worry you don’t need to memorize it 🙂 .
If you have ever picked up an ABAP book or seen a fellow ABAP colleague code, you must have seen lot of complicated stuff and become scared of it. Let me assure you that BI ABAP is much more simple and straightforward. It’s just a small simpler part of what an ABAP consultant has to live through.
Now where does a BW consultant need ABAP?
On the ECC side :
- Enhancement of Datasources
- Creation of custom structures like TABLES and views
- Creation of function module based extractors
On the BW side :
- Transformation routines
- DTP/Infopackage dynamic filters
- BEx Query customer exits
And of course the most important part – for debugging issues in codes.
We would take these topics up one by one and explain in simple straightforward language with real time examples for better understanding.
With enough practice you’ll be a master of BI ABAP in due time.
Watch out for future posts for the technical tutorials on this topic and please share this tutorial on social media using the share buttons below to help this website grow and become better.
Until next time. Happy Learning.