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

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

In short, SAP is a modular based application that sits on top of a database (as many applications do). Many people mistake SAP as being a database, but in fact it is just the application.

By 'modular based application' I mean that 'SAP Netweaver' is a bit like 'Microsoft Office' in that it is an application or set of applications that contains many components/modules. With SAP you can add modules (such as Finance, HR, Banking, Logistics, etc.) to meet your business requirements.

ABAP is a bespoke programming language that is used within SAP. SAP also now has components that are purely ABAP based, purely JAVA based or a mixture of the two. SAP can also integrate with other technologies such as .net and PHP.

Answer 2

Attempt to provide simplified explanation:

SAP

• Firstly it is a product.
• Owner company, derives its name with the product name "SAP"
• It is a management system (i.e. referred as ERP). Which means, this is a tool used for "managing the system" (domain specific - finance etc.).

Now, that SAP has created an environment around SAP. In order to operate in SAP environment (i.e. for customisations etc.), language-abstraction was required. Here comes ABAP.

ABAP

• It is a language (high level), which is used in the SAP environment for customisations or new feature implementations.
• It is high-level, because, it is known only in SAP environment.

Therefore, any customisation on the basic version of SAP given to some customer of SAP would require ABAP usage, otherwise, just delivered SAP is good enough for usage (i.e. no ABAP required).

Now is another term HANA.

HANA

• This is an in-memory RDBMS.
• Another tool/product by SAP, you would say, and its prime focus is to facilitate "analytics".
• The way, this is designed, gives high compression (column-wise storage) and hence is majorly used for "READ" operations, which is why it is associated with "analysis".

SAP and HANA together abstracts the underlying complexity of database-access queries and UI (developed in java), together, to make the user experience good for the management system (used majorly in analytics, and so that the main focus stays in analytics). This very specific tool/product, is said as "technology", as it has an environment of its own (terminologies etc.). ABAP facilitates further development of the SAP-ERP.

The underlying development is in C, C++ (and ABAP) for SAP.