Modern SAP landscapes running on SAP HANA demand a rethink of how ABAP programs access data. Traditional Open SQL queries embedded in ABAP code have served developers for decades, but at large data volumes, they can become performance bottlenecks. SAP’s introduction of Core Data Services (CDS) views offers a new paradigm: push more work to the in-memory database and retrieve only what’s needed.  Traditional ABAP Data Access With Open SQL Open SQL is the standard SQL interface in ABAP that allows developers to query the underlying database in a database-agnostic way. For example, an ABAP report might join two tables and fetch results like this: