Tools for custom development

[Former Member]

Hello!

I have done some programming in MS Excel(VBA) - source data are taken from bw and erp systems. This program does complicated computation based on the source data and it takes few hours to execute. Results are later analyzed with different Excel files. Now I need to extend this program with addition source data and calculations which Excel might not handle.

What tools within the SAP NetWeaver you can suggest for custom application development?

Best Regards,

Maris Klimavicius

[Former Member]

Hi,

If your answer to previous question is that you cant/dont want to use SAP BI for processing of data, the first question that I'd ask you is: are you familiar with either ABAP or JAVA?

If yes, which one? If both, which one would you prefer to work with?

If no, then we can discuss other possibilities.

Regards

[Former Member]

I am familiar with Visual basic and this is my first preference, but I also have knowledge of ABAP.

[Former Member]

Basically, you need a VM/Application server that can handle processing of large datasets. Visual Basic is extremely good for rapid application development but when it comes to large data processing and computations of millions of records, its not the best choice available. There are a lot of overheads of this development environment that make it unsuitable for your case. Unless you are ok to work with Win32 API using VB, I'd strongly suggest using ABAP which has been built ground up for data processing. Moreover, when using VB, you may need to employ techniques for parallel processing to reduce the processing time. All of this can be handled in ABAP very easily. Unless you can use SQL Server's data processing capabilities for analytics, I think you should re-evualte your current preferences.

Thoughts????

Message was edited by:

Shehryar Khan

Message was edited by:

Shehryar Khan

[Former Member]

If you can give some more details of your current situation, such as how frequently do you need to process this data, the format of data, nature of datasets (sequential vs. random) etc, I think it would be easier to make some recommendations. Generally speaking, ABAP/WebAS would be the best bet for processing large datasets. But then you can have some specific requirements that would limit its usage. For example, my current client uses ETL tools from IBM for all their data processing/transfer needs. The consider it more of an architectural preference rather than technical. So if you have such considerations, please mention them.

Regards

[Former Member]

Can these calculations/manipulations not be handled within BW?

[Former Member]

I think no, because calculations are based on different parameters, which are manually entered/changed before calculating current results.