Starting with OpenSQL

As ABAP was invented as a report language, it has a huge set of statements for accessing tables. ABAP was designed for high-performance database operations, but not for the definition or control of database tables. By definition, it's usually not the mission of the program to create or control database tables. However, those functionalities are included implicitly within the SAP system.

The section of ABAP that accesses the database tables is named OpenSQL and includes similar commands to standard SQL, such as SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE, which are known as data manipulation language (DML). The differences between standard SQL and OpenSQL include the fact that OpenSQL is platform independent and part of the ABAP language. This enables the syntax check to identify errors within the implementation of the SQL statement. Furthermore, there are several variants of the commands that are only for ABAP programs, which ease or accelerate the database accesses.

The platform...