The Role of CDS Views in SAP HANA

Core Data Service (CDS) is a data definition language that is semantically rich and created by SAP. It is possible to use CDS view SAP to define and consume data models on the database instead of the application server. CDS views is a platform that is especially used for creating data models that can be moved outside applications by using ODATA services.

This post will take you through the intricacies of CDS view SAP starting from what is SAP CDS.

SAP CDS

SAP CDS, an acronym for SAP Core Data Services is an infrastructure for data modeling, ensuring that data models are consumed and defined on the database server instead of the more common application server. This helps to leverage the robust and powerful in-memory database of SAP HANA for meeting the need for real-time performance. Users can do so by performing optimized operations at the database level for fast retrieving of data and reducing application execution time. SAP CDS is used to design the underlying data model that application servers show clients as UI and CDS view SAP.

CDS View SAP

Core Data Service Views are virtual data models in-built in SAP HANA allowing access directly to the underlying tables of the HANA database. CDS View SAP was launched with the new programming model of SAP. The goal of CDS View SAP is to enable logic from the application server to the client-side and database. It is termed as ‘Code-to-Data’ or ‘Code Pushdown’ by SAP. The CDS View SAP extracts the logic from the ABAP applications and executes it on the database.

Advantages of the CDS View SAP

Some of the advantages of the CDS View SAP are as follows.

The first is that CDS View SAP is a code-to-data technique in ABAP. Here, all computations and calculations are performed on the DB layer rather than fetching all data to the application server. Next, CDS View SAP has features that are less conventional in SE11 views and can be accessed beyond the native SAP applications. Further, CDS View SAP is independent of the database and is run on any SAP supported database platform. CDS supports client handling automatically with the ability to publish ODATA services using annotations directly from CDS views.

Types of CDS View SAP

There are two types of CDS View SAP. One is the HANA CDS Views and the other is the ABAP CDS views. Previously, CDS View SAP was available only in the SAP HANA environment. But lately, CDS is enabled in SAP NetWeaver AS ABAP. This allows developers to use ABAP programming tools in the ABAP layer while executing the code in the database. A wide range of capabilities is supported by SAP CDS including relationship definitions, conceptual modeling, and built-in functions and extensions, much more than what the old data modeling tools had to offer.