SAP ABAP Interview Questions

1) What is SAP ABAP?

SAP is a type of software known as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) that large company use to manage their day to day affairs. ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming) is the coding language for SAP to develop RICEFW objects. (Reports, Interfaces, Extensions, Forms and Workflows).

2) What do you mean by an ABAP data dictionary?

To describe the logical structures of the objects that are used in application development ABAP 4 data dictionary is used.  It is also used to show the underlying relational database in tables.

3) Explain the difference between pool tables and transparent tables?

Transparent tables:  It has one to one relation with the table in the database.  Its structure corresponds to single database field.

Pooled tables: It has many to one relation with the table in the database.  Pooled tables are stored at the database level.

• Basic List: For simple reports
• Statistics:  For Percentage, Average etc.
• Ranked List : For analytical reports

4) What do you mean by BDC (Batch Data Communications) programming?

It is an automatic procedure to transfer large or external data into SAP system. ‘Queue file’ is the central component of the transfer, which receives the data through batch input programs and groups that are associated into ‘sessions’.

5) Describe the data classes?

The data classes are classified into following classes

Master Data: The data in this class seldom change

Transaction Data: The data can be changed often in this class

Organization Data:  This data is a customized data and is entered in the system when the system is configured. It is rarely changed.

System Data:  This data is used by R/3 system itself

6) What are the internal tables?

Internal table exists only when the program is run. It is used for performing table calculations on subset of database tables and also for re-organizing the content of database tables as per the users need.

7) List down the functional modules used in sequence in BDC?

There are 3 functional modules which are used in sequence to perform data transfer successfully using BDC programming.  They are

• BDC_OPEN_GROUP
• BDC_INSERT
• BDC_CLOSE_GROUP

8) What is dispatcher?

A control agent referred as SAP dispatcher, manages resources for the R/3 applications.

9) Mention what are the two methods of modifying SAP standard tables?

There are two methods for modifying SAP standard tables

• Append structures
• Customizing includes

10) What is the difference between a ‘Database index’ and a ‘Match code’?

‘Database Index’ contains fields from one table while ‘Match Code’ contains fields from several tables. Match code objects can be built on cluster tables, transparent tables and pooled tables.

11) Explain the benefits of modularization technique?

By using modularization techniques, you can avoid redundancy if the program contains the same or similar blocks of statements or it is required to process the same function several times.  By modularizing the ABAP/4 programs, we make them easy to read and improve their structure.  Modularized programs are also easier to maintain and update.

12) How can you create callable modules of program code within one ABAP/4 program?

By defining Macros

By creating include programs in the library.

13)   What are different types of parameters? How can you distinguish between different kinds of parameters?

The different types of parameters are

• Formal Parameters:  It is defined during the definition of subroutine with the ‘FORM’ statement
• Actual Parameters:  It is specified during the call of a subroutine with the ‘PERFORM’ statement

You can distinguish different kind of parameters by their functionality.  Input parameters are used to pass data to subroutines, while output parameters are used to pass data from subroutines.

14) What are the ways you can do the tuning? What are the major steps will you use for these?

Tunning can be done in three ways disk I/O, sql tunning and memory tunning.  Before tunning, you have to get the status of your database using oracle utility called statpack and tkprof.

15) In the ‘select’ statement what is ‘group by’?

To fetch the data from the table by the specified field Group by Clause is used.