The following texts were partially or completely generated with the help of generative AI models.
On May 25, 2020, the 2nd, updated and expanded edition of the German version of my book SQLScript für SAP HANA published by Rheinwerk Verlag was released. When the first edition came out in September 2018, I never imagined that demand would be so high that a 2nd edition would become necessary.
I also hadn't expected that my business would shift more and more away from pure consulting and development toward training and coaching. But the demand for high-quality training in the area of SQLScript and SAP HANA technologies is still strong. And the positive feedback from my participants encouraged me to focus mainly on training now. Thank you very much for all the positive responses!
And that's how I ended up becoming one of the biggest buyers of my own books myself. By now it must have been almost 250 copies that I have handed over to my training participants.
What's new in the 2nd edition
Since the end of last year, I have been working on the additions and updates for the 2nd edition of SQLScript for SAP HANA. In the last two service packs, many exciting features were added to the SQLScript language, some of which I absolutely wanted to include in the new edition.
I have already written blog articles for a few of them:
- SQLScript Unit Tests, the End-User Test Framework
- Parallel Processing with MAP_MERGE
- User Defined Libraries (UDL) in SQLScript
- Recursive Procedure Calls in SQLScript
- Embedded (or anonymous) Functions in SQLScript
- DML Table Variables
The other topics are just listed briefly here. As soon as I find enough time, I will write a bit more about these as well:
- Lateral Join - The term Lateral Join is somewhat misleading, since it is not another type of join, such as Inner Join or Left Outer Join. Rather, a Lateral Join is a join in which the join partner is a correlated subquery or a function. You can imagine a Lateral Join in such a way that the subquery is executed separately for each row of the previous result. It is possible to access the data of the current row via the correlation name.
- The SQLSCRIPT_STRING library offers additional functions for processing strings:
- With
SPLITyou can break down a string into several small sections at separator characters - With
FORMATyou can format a string using a syntax from the Python language - And with
TABLE_SUMMARYyou can turn a table into a string
- With
- With ABAP BASIS 7.53, scalar AMDP functions are possible. This is especially important for BW/4HANA routine development, since these were not possible before.
- With the
SERIES_GENERATE_functions, data series can be generated. This is particularly handy for date values.
And of course, countless smaller additions and corrections are included as well. For example, many screenshots of the BW interfaces in the SAP GUI were replaced with the new BW/4HANA interfaces in Eclipse.
Overall, the total volume of the 2nd edition of SQLScript for SAP HANA has grown by 38 pages. The effort for the book project was once again much higher than originally planned. But the result is something to be proud of.
