This post is addressed to the collective character that represents all the people who have told me that they like some things in the new 7.4 functional syntax but think that you shouldn’t overdo it and should avoid using REDUCE and all the other unnecessarily weird things because the code gets more obscure, it’s slower and they don’t see any advantages.

Are you serious?

In the last years of the previous century, an SAP project manager stubbornly opposed to upgrading the SAP system. Instead, he decided that all the SAP notes belonging to that upgrade were to be manually implemented. All 1000 of them.

This Tuesday I was invited by Renan Correa to participate in his podcast “Sem especificação”.

My dear friend Sérgio Fraga passed away. Abapinho also belongs to him. Forever. Thank you my friend for everything you were.

João studies Computer Science at his College where he learns Java, polymorphism, encapsulation and a lot of other programming techniques and best practices. When he graduates, he decides to join a company to work in SAP. At the introduction training which his new company offers, the first thing he learns is how to make a program in ABAP. Here’s how they teach it:

_“Go to transaction SE38, create program ZJOAO and then create includes ZJOAO_TOP, ZJOAO_FRM and ZJOAO_SEL. You declare all variables in _TOP, the selection screen you put in _SEL and all the FORMS must go into FRM. Then write START-OF-SELECTION and under that put all the SELECTs and finally write END-OF-SELECTION and there you show the results in an ALV. It’s that simple. Welcome to ABAP."

Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do SY-DATUM.

I’m 6 years old! (Thank you Caleb Prichard for the photo)

Go to the ABAP Editor (SE38) and check out line 323 of standard program RCIFCUST. If you’re lazy, here it is: SAP programmers are wild. Thanks Brian Wolfe for the photo. Greetings from Abapinho

Most of my friends, when they buy a new computer, worry a lot about CPU speed, disk speed and memory speed and whatnot speed. And then they go and buy a €6 mouse and a €7 keyboard. Ironic. While the CPU, the disk and the memory and all that other stuff often end up being wasted, the mouse and the keyboard are used to the max the entire time the computer is in use.

Depois de o site irmão ABAPZombie (grande site brasileiro sobre ABAP) me ter entrevistado há uns meses atrás, aqui fica finalmente a minha vingança Zômbica. Entrevistar o Mauricio foi muito simples porque as perguntas que me fizeram são tão boas que resolvi virá-las contra o feiticeiro (Mauricio, espero que não leves a mal ter-tas usurpado!). As suas óptimas respostas ajudarão certamente os leitores portugueses a terem uma ideia de como funciona o mercado ABAP lá no Brasil:

I have a number of friends working as managers, lawyers, marketers, programmers, etc., at very dynamic and competitive companies who are allegedly very busy and are always up to their eyeballs in work. They dedicated several years of their lives to their degrees in order to specialise in a particular field and some of them have put in the extra effort to get a postgraduate diploma in order to be better qualified and therefore able to do more both better and faster. However, the vast majority of them use two fingers when typing at a computer. Over a number of years they have acquired many skills that supposedly make them ultra efficient and yet they still type with two fingers.

RICEF is an acronym in SAP world which apparently was not invented by SAP. And so it is an unofficial acronym. Which does not mean it is an illegal or secret acronym given that it has become a term in proper usage in more and more projects. RICEF means Report , Interface , Conversion , Enhancement , Form and, basically, refers to any kind of development that might be needed in a SAP project.

Era uma vez um cliente com um sistema produtivo com 9 servidores mais rápidos que a própria sombra. Esses 9 servidores eram geridos por 4 administradores de sistema muito bons que os mantinham sempre oleados e a fluírem à velocidade máxima. Um dia tive de desenvolver um carregamento muito complexo que criava milhões de classificações. Quando se começou a testar o programa, constatou-se que algo estava muito lento, lento demais. Na maior parte do tempo o programa estava encalhado à espera de SELECTs sequenciais à tabela INOB, que era gigante.

No Inverno de 2006 trabalhava no projecto SAP de um enorme retalhista internacional, com centenas de supermercados espalhados por todo um país. Uma bela manhã, pelas 11h45 comecei a ver várias pessoas com ar alarmado a correr de um lado para o outro no escritório. Perguntei o que se passava e se podia ajudar e explicaram-me que não conseguiam fazer a encomenda de leite para o dia seguinte que tinha de ser feita até às 12h15 mas que não tinha nada a ver comigo, que eu não podia ajudar.

Mas afinal o que é que quer dizer ABAP? Em 1970 chamaram-lhe ABAP que queria dizer “Allgemeiner Berichts-Aufbereitungs-Prozessor”, ou em português “Processador de geração de reports genéricos”. Em 1990 mudaram-lhe o nome para ABAP/4 e disseram que afinal queria dizer “Advanced Business Application Programming”, ou em português “Programação avançada para aplicações de negócio”. Em 2000 largam o /4 e tornaram a chamar-lhe só ABAP e é o que ainda lhe chamam agora.