What are ABAP and SAP?

Question

What are SAP and ABAP? I searched and got a bunch of different acronyms that don't quite make sense.

• Is SAP a database engine?
• Is ABAP a programming language?
• Or are they nothing of that nature?

What are they primarily used for?

Answer 1

SAP is a full Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system and business platform. SAP is the company, that produces the business platform and the associated modules (financials, general ledger, &c).

ABAP is the primary programming language used to write SAP software and customizations. It would do it injustice to think of it as COBOL and SQL on steroids, but that gives you an idea. ABAP runs within the SAP system.

SAP and ABAP abstract the DB and run atop various underlying DBMSs.

SAP produces other things as well and even publicly says they dabble in Java and even produce a J2EE container, but tried-and-true SAP is ABAP through-and-through.

Answer 2

SAP is just a company name and Abap or Abap/4 is a language programming. SAP company has a lot of products: ERP(material, sales, costs, financial), CRM, SRM, SCM and all of them are customizing and programmed with ABAP and Java. Basically is it.

Answer 3

I have worked with SAP since 1998. SAP is a type of software called ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) that large companies use to manage their day to day affairs. On the macro, the software can be split into two categories: Technical and Functional

Let's go Technical first, as it answers the "What is ABAP" part of your question.

Technical

There are two technical "stacks" within the SAP software, the first is the ABAP stack which is inclusive of all the original technology that SAP was. ABAP is the proprietary coding language for SAP to develop RICEFW objects (Reports, Interfaces, Conversions, Extensions, Forms and Workflows) within the ABAP stack.

The ABAP stack is traditionally navigated via Transaction Codes (T-Codes) to take you to different screens within the SAP Environment. From a technical perspective, you will do all of your performance and tuning of the WORK PROCESSES in the SAP system here, as well as configuring all of the system RFCs, building user profiles and also doing the necessary interfacing between the OS (usually Windows or HPUX) and the Oracle Database (currently Enterprise 11g).

The JAVA stack controls the "Netweaver" aspect of SAP which encapsulates SAP's ability to be accessed via the Internet via SAP Portal and it's ability to interface with other SAP and non-SAP legacy systems via Process Integration (PI).

SAP also has extensive capabilities in the Business Intelligence Field (BI) by accessing information stored within the Business Warehouse (BW). Currently, there is a new technology called HANA 1.0 that compresses the time to run reports against these repositories.

There are two primarily technologists that run ALL of these functions, they are called SAP Basis (Netweaver) Administrators and ABAP Developers.

Functional

SAP has specific pre-populated functional packages for different business areas. For example, Exxon runs the "IS Oil & Gas" package while Bank of America runs the "Banking" package, while further still Lockheed Martin runs the "Aerospace & Defense" package. These packages were developed over time by the amalgamation of intelligent functional customizations that could be intelligently ported to the system via inclusion in dot releases.

However, there are some vanilla functional modules that almost all entities run, regardless of their specific industry:

• HR: Human Resources
• PM: Project Management
• FI: Financial
• CO: Controllers
• MM: Materials Management
• SD: Sales and Distribution
• PP: Production Planning

and finally the biggie:

• MDM: Master Data Management which encapsulates the data for customer/vendor/material etc.

Answer 4

with SAP, you might be referring to a popular business software:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_AG

And according to Wikipedia, ABAP is a programming language (short for Advanced Business Application Programming) created by SAP AG.

Answer 5

• SAP SE is a German multinational that makes enterprise software. It is best known for SAP ERP and its predecessors (SAP R/2 & SAP R/3). As the name suggests, SAP ERP is an ERP system, which basically means that it supports a wide range of business processes from warehouse management and sales to HR, business intelligence, etc.
  
  Although SAP ERP isn't the only software sold by SAP, people are typically refering to SAP ERP when they say "they're using SAP at work". It's important to note, though, that SAP is the name of the company and no software is sold or licensed as just "SAP".

• ABAP is a 4GL programming language created by SAP, and commonly compared with OpenEdge ABL or COBOL. Much of SAP's software is written in ABAP. SAP provides an ABAP Workbench, which is a collection of tools that allows third party developers to develop, test and run custom ABAP programs within the SAP ERP system. The ABAP Workbench is typically used only when business logic cannot be implemented in SAP ERP by means of mere configuration.

Answer 6

In addition to all the regular confusion around SAP issues might also stem form the fact that SAP used to have their own DBMS ..

It used to be called Adabas (marketed originally by Nixdorf and then by Software AG) and was a quite popular DBMS for smaller SAP (the ERP solution) installations in Germany. At some point (AFAIK around 2000) SAP started to co-develop/support/take over Adabas and marketed it as SAP DB and later MaxDB under commercial and open-source licenses. There also was/is some agreement with MySQL.

But when people talk about SAP, they usually refer to the ERP solution as the other posters have noted.