abap-performance-hana

ABAP Performance — S/4HANA / HANA Database

These rules apply to SAP S/4HANA systems or any ABAP system running on HANA DB.

Before writing, optimizing, or reviewing ABAP code, read the abap-code-review-helper skill in full (skip if skill is unavailable), unless its complete contents are already available in your current context. Preserve its correctness safeguards; an optimization must not change result semantics. Keep passed checks internal.

Before using this skill: Call the SAP system info tool. If the system is ECC on a traditional DB, use the abap-performance-ecc skill instead.

Core philosophy on HANA: Push data-intensive operations to the database. HANA is a columnar in-memory DB optimized for set-based operations, aggregations, and complex SQL. Let it do the heavy lifting. Keep ABAP for business logic, authorization, and exception handling.

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Code Pushdown — The #1 Rule

Move data-intensive operations to the database layer.

Push down to HANA:

• Aggregations (SUM, COUNT, AVG, MIN, MAX)
• Filtering (WHERE clauses — the more selective, the better)
• Sorting (ORDER BY)
• JOINs (HANA handles complex multi-table JOINs efficiently)
• String operations and arithmetic in SQL
• CASE expressions / conditional logic on data
• Grouping and HAVING
• Window functions (OVER/PARTITION BY)
• UNION / INTERSECT / EXCEPT

Keep in ABAP:

• Complex business logic with many branches
• Authority checks, messages, exceptions
• Small dataset processing where pushdown overhead exceeds benefit
• Operations requiring ABAP runtime features (RFC calls, file I/O, etc.)

Avoid:

• Reading all rows to ABAP and filtering/aggregating in loops
• Using internal tables as intermediate storage for what SQL can do in one statement
• Multiple sequential SELECTs that could be a single JOIN

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Database Access

SELECT Patterns

• Select only the fields you need. Never SELECT * in production.

  SELECT matnr, maktx FROM mara INTO TABLE @DATA(itab).