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 it.
SAP HANA is built on columnar, in-memory architecture. It can process billions of rows in seconds when you let it. But classic ABAP SELECT loops bypass that capability entirely. Instead of asking HANA to do the heavy lifting, that old code was dragging everything up into application memory and doing the work there — like hiring a Formula 1 driver and then asking them to push the car.
That was my wake-up call. I had to learn ABAP on HANA. Not because my job was at risk — but because I could suddenly see the ceiling I had been hitting without even knowing it.
What I Learned First — And What I Wish I Had Learned First
What I Actually Did
Like most developers, I started by Googling. I found documentation, blog posts, and SAP Community threads. I learned what CDS Views were theoretically. I understood the concept of push-down logic. I nodded along to explanations of AMDPs and SQLScript.
But I was not writing any code.
The single biggest mistake I made in my first three months was consuming content without building anything. I could explain CDS Views at a dinner party before I had written a single one in ADT.
What I Should Have Done
Open the SAP BTP Free Tier on day one and start writing. Even bad CDS Views. Even broken ones. The learning accelerates dramatically the moment your fingers are on the keyboard and you are reading actual error messages rather than watching someone else’s tutorial.
My advice: read for 20 percent of your time, build for 80 percent. The theory makes sense only once you have felt the frustration of a wrong annotation or a broken association.
The Moment Everything Clicked
About four months into my learning journey, I rewrote that four-hour report. I replaced the nested SELECT loops with a single CDS View using aggregations pushed down to HANA. I added an association for the related master data instead of a separate SELECT. I used an AMDP for one particularly complex calculation that needed SQLScript.
The rewritten report ran in six minutes.
Then I tuned the CDS View using EXPLAIN PLAN in ADT, identified a missing index on one field, and coordinated with the BASIS team to add it.
The report ran in forty seconds.
Same data. Same business logic. Forty seconds instead of four hours. That is not an incremental improvement — it is a different category of solution entirely. That was the moment ABAP on HANA stopped being a skill I was learning and became a skill I believed in completely.
The Three Skills That Made the Biggest Career Impact
After two years of working extensively with SAP ABAP on HANA across multiple S/4HANA projects, these are the three skills that generated the most visible career impact — not just technical satisfaction, but actual opportunities, rate increases, and client recognition.
1. CDS Views With Associations and Annotations
Every S/4HANA project I have worked on since making the switch has needed CDS expertise. Fiori apps, analytical reports, OData services, SAP Analytics Cloud consumption — all of it flows through CDS. Developers who can navigate SAP’s standard VDM and build clean, reusable custom CDS hierarchies are genuinely rare, and clients notice.
The annotation knowledge matters more than most tutorials suggest. Understanding @UI, @Analytics, @Semantics, and @OData namespaces turns you from a developer who builds backends into a developer who can deliver end-to-end Fiori features independently. That capability commands a significant premium.
2. Performance Analysis With EXPLAIN PLAN and PlanViz
This skill is the one most junior ABAP on HANA developers skip — and it is the one that most impresses senior architects and clients. Being able to open a CDS View or AMDP in ADT, run an EXPLAIN PLAN, read the output, identify the bottleneck, and propose a concrete fix is a rare capability. Most developers can write HANA-optimised code. Far fewer can diagnose why HANA-optimised code is still underperforming.
If you want to move from developer to consultant to architect, this is the skill that marks the transition.
3. ABAP RAP for Fiori App Delivery
The ABAP RESTful Application Programming Model changed the way I think about SAP development entirely. Before RAP, building a transactional Fiori app required coordinating ABAP developers, UI5 developers, OData configuration specialists, and often a Basis consultant. With RAP and Fiori Elements, a single experienced ABAP developer can deliver a working transactional app end-to-end.
That capability makes you extraordinarily valuable on lean project teams — which is exactly what most mid-market SAP customers are running.
What the Career Change Actually Looked Like
I want to be honest here because most content about career transitions oversimplifies the financial narrative.
In the first six months of learning ABAP on HANA, I earned nothing extra. I was investing time — evenings, weekends — and taking on tasks slightly above my current capability on live projects, which meant I was sometimes slower than I would have been using classic ABAP techniques.
By month eight, I had enough genuine hands-on experience to represent ABAP on HANA skills honestly on my profile and in client conversations.
By month twelve, my day rate had increased by 28 percent. Not because I negotiated harder — but because I was now able to take on work that other developers in my network could not.
By month eighteen, I was being specifically requested by name on S/4HANA migration projects because of a reputation built on that first performance turnaround story. Word travels fast in the SAP consulting world.
The financial return on the investment was significant. But it was not immediate, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
The Questions I Get Asked Most Often
“Do I need to know classic ABAP before learning ABAP on HANA?”
Yes — and this is non-negotiable. ABAP on HANA is not a replacement for classic ABAP knowledge. It is an extension of it. You need to understand the ABAP programming model, data types, object-oriented concepts, and how the application server interacts with the database before the HANA-specific optimisation concepts will make sense. If you are brand new to ABAP, start with classic ABAP fundamentals and plan a twelve to eighteen month journey before specialising in HANA-specific techniques.
“Which certification should I pursue first?”
Start with C_TAW12_750 — ABAP with SAP NetWeaver. It validates your core ABAP foundations and is recognised by virtually every SAP employer and client. Once you have that, add a specific S/4HANA developer certification to signal your HANA focus. The combination of the two is significantly more compelling than either alone.
“Is it worth learning if I am not already in the SAP ecosystem?”
This is the most complex question. The honest answer is: it depends on your starting point. If you have a background in enterprise software, databases, or Java/Python development, the learning curve to productive ABAP on HANA is twelve to eighteen months with consistent effort. If you are starting from zero in software development, expect twenty-four to thirty-six months before you are genuinely employable at a professional level. The salaries justify the investment — but the investment is real.
What I Would Tell My 2023 Self
Start earlier. The S/4HANA migration wave was already building in 2023 — I could see the signals. But I hesitated because the learning curve felt steep and my classic ABAP work was comfortable and well-paid.
Comfort is the enemy of career growth in technology. The developers who are commanding the highest rates and the most interesting project work in 2026 are the ones who started learning ABAP on HANA two or three years ago, when it still felt like an investment rather than an obvious move.
The best time to have started was 2023. The second best time is today.
Conclusion: The Switch Is Worth It — But Do It With Eyes Open
Switching from classic ABAP to SAP ABAP on HANA is not a weekend project. It is a genuine professional development investment that requires months of consistent effort, hands-on practice, and the willingness to be a beginner again in a field where you were already expert.
But the outcomes — in capability, in career options, in financial reward, and in the simple satisfaction of watching a four-hour report become a forty-second one — make it one of the best professional decisions I have ever made.
If you are sitting on the fence, I hope this post pushed you off it.
