In this world of SAP programming, ABAP is the universal language. In most of the projects, the focus is on getting a team of ABAP programmers as soon as possible, handing over the technical specifications to them and asking them to churn out the ABAP programs within the “given deadlines”.

Often due to this pressure of schedules and deliveries, the main focus of making a efficient program takes a back seat. An efficient ABAP program is one which delivers the required output to the user in a finite time as per the complexity of the program, rather than hearing the comment “I put the program to run, have my lunch and come back to check the results”.

Leaving aside the hyperbole, a performance optimized ABAP program saves the time of the end user, thus increasing the productivity of the user, and in turn keeping the user and the management happy.

This tutorial focuses on presenting various performance tuning tips and tricks to make the ABAP programs efficient in doing their work. This tutorial also assumes that the reader is well versed in all the concepts and syntax of ABAP programming.

NOTE: Performance of a program is also often limited due to hardware restrictions, which is out of the scope of this article.

This tutorial contains a number of tips & tricks, each one a separate page. You can either browse them one by one (click on the NEXT button), or jump straight to a tip or trick which interests you by clicking on the menu in the left hand column. The ABAP tips & tricks covered are:

• Selection criteria

• Aggregate functions

• Views instead of base tables

• The "into table" clause

• Modifying a group of lines

• Use of binary search option

• Appending two internal tables

• Table buffering

• Use of "for all" entries

• Proper structure of "where" clause

• Proper use of "move" statement

• Proper use of "inner join"

• Use of "ABAP Sort" instead of "Order By"

• Tools for analysis of performance