All That You Need to Know About CDS View SAP

A View is not a persistent entity and is defined as the projection of several other entities. SAP HANA XS (SAP HANA Extended Application) helps to define a view in a CDS document that can be stored as design-time file in the repository. The repository files can be read by applications that are specifically developed and includes view definition that can be transported to other SAP HANA systems.

What is SAP CDS

SAP CDS (SAP Core Data Service) is an architecture for data modeling. It helps to define and consume data models not on the application server but the database server. The powerful in-memory database of SAP HANA is thereby leveraged to fulfill certain key requirements. It includes performing fast real-time performance for maximum operations at database level, assisting users to retrieve data quickly, and reducing application execution time. SAP CDS is used by developers to create underlying data models that application services expose to UI clients as CDS View SAP.

What is CDS View SAP?

CDS View SAP is virtual data model of SAP HANA that allow direct access to underlying tables of the HANA database. CDS View SAP was launched along with the new programming model of SAP and is focused on pushing logic from the application server to the client-side and database. SAP defines this as ‘Code -to-Data’ or ‘Code Pushdown’. It is carried out by the CDS View SAP which derives the logic from the ABAP application and executes it on the database server instead of the application server. ABAP CDS Views are located in the application server while the logic is processed in the database and are created using an improved version of the open SQL syntax.

Data in SAP is physically stored in transparent tables while for data modeling purposes, CDS View SAP is an abstraction layer on top of the tables. This establishes the relationship between database tables and hides the complexity from the ABAP programmer.

HANA CDS Views and ABAP CDS Views

There are two types of CDS View SAP – HANA CDS Views and ABAP CDS views. In the past CDS View SAP was only available in the SAP HANA ecosystem but now CDS is also enabled in SAP NetWeaver as ABAP. This allows developers to work with ABAP programming layer while the execution of the code is relegated to the database. CDS View SAP supports built-in functions and extensions, conceptual modeling, and relationship definitions which are an improvement over the traditional data modeling tools.

There are several advantages of CDS View SAP. It can be exposed as an OData Service for accessing and extracting SAP data. CDS Views are independent of databases like Open SQL and can be run on any database system that matches the SAP environment. A critical feature is that CDS View SAP supports automatic client handling.