Читать книгу Leveraging SAP BRFplus in Big Data Scenarios - Tom Zamir - Страница 5

Preface

“Some rules can be bent, others can be broken”.

[Morpheus (The Matrix)].

BRFplus is a highly capable business rules management system (BRMS) that is integrated into SAP NetWeaver. It offers extreme flexibility and functionality for designing business rules for business applications, while providing a relatively pleasing, business-oriented, user experience—a combination that is far from trivial. Instead of writing elaborate ABAP programs (or SQLScripts, see Chapter 8), you can literally customize them—without even being aware of it. The combination of the inherent ability of BRFplus to generate code automatically and the graphical user interface make BRFplus the perfect tool for handling highly complex and/or highly dynamic decisions that occur in various business processes. BRFplus is therefore attractive to technical users as well as business users, with each of these groups having their own different aims.

Rules authoring in BRFplus is regarded as being somewhere between conventional customization and writing code. But if you think about it long enough, you will realize that ABAP development is just a (very) advanced form of customization.

This book was written from the perspective of a “new-age consultant”. In essence, this simply means ignoring the artificial boundary between the roles of the functional and the technical consultants. Why should only one of them think about the solution from the business perspective? And why should the other use only technological means to implement the solution? Is it not plausible that the ABAP developer can do a better job by having a deeper understanding of the business requirement or the business problem that needs a solution? (A business requirement and a business problem are not the same thing.) Is it not plausible that the functional consultant can deliver a better solution by focusing on what the customer may want or actually needs, in addition to what the customer officially requests? It is possible that the customer is not even aware of the variety of the viable solutions that are available to them—so they would never ask for them. By being intimately familiar with the state-of-the-art technological solutions and tools, the functional consultant can introduce the customer to new, perhaps more promising, ideas.

From the functional perspective, in most cases, being somewhat oblivious to the underlying technology is harmless. After all, being able to seamlessly create and maintain elaborate business rules is part of the charm of BRFplus. But as with most things, poor construction can lead to fragility; when put under extreme stress, cracks can appear and there may even be a complete failure. One such stress can be having to apply BRFplus rules in large numbers in a single batch process. This pressure becomes significant when we are dealing with extremely large datasets. The potential failure would be the inability to process the entire population of business cases within an acceptable time period.

Today more than ever, big data plays an increasing part in supporting business decisions. Once a highly expensive activity, in the past, the processing of big data was mainly used to support strategic business decisions. Today, however, as analyzing big data is becoming less and less costly as suitable technology becomes cheaper, it is more practical for it to be used at the tactical level of the business. Big data can be used to form new business rules or update existing ones—or it may be modified as the result of applying business rules to the big data. Both directions are discussed in this book, whereby the lion’s share is dedicated to the latter, as it is the more common scenario in SAP ERP implementations. (Chapter 6 deals with the first option.)

This book is not a BRFplus manual. Instead, it offers tips and techniques for optimizing the use of BRFplus in scenarios where the business rules are to be applied to a vast number of business cases simultaneously. Some of the guidelines that are presented here affect the way the business rules are fashioned in BRFplus, while others affect the architecture of the programs using the rules. The goal is to push the breaking point of BRFplus rules upwards by enabling scalability—that is, the ability to process any size of population, (ideally) dependent only on the physical resources available.

This book is aimed at BRFplus consultants, ABAP developers, and solution architects. The reader should have a solid understanding of ABAP principles but no prior knowledge of BRFplus is assumed (Chapter 2 presents BRFplus basics in brief). Nevertheless, you should try to gain more comprehensive knowledge of BRFplus usage (where this is missing) while you are reading this book. You may consider watching specific lessons from the online course Use BRFplus Like a Pro! that can be found in the Espresso Tutorials library.

Personal dedication

This book is dedicated to my first-born son, Ethan, who was born while I was writing this book.

Special thanks also go to my beloved wife Chen. Your unconditional love and endless support were crucial in completing this book.

Heartfelt thanks also to my parents, Sarah and Ahron (Roni).

I also wish to thank Alice Adams from Espresso Tutorials, who first suggested that I write this book and gave me the opportunity to make it happen.

We have added a few icons to highlight important information. These include:

Tip

Tips highlight information concerning more details about the subject being described and/or additional background information.

Example

Examples help illustrate a topic better by relating it to real world scenarios.

Warning

Warnings draw attention to information that you should be aware of when you go through the examples from this book on your own.

Video

Go to the homepage of Espresso Tutorials to watch a video.

Exercises

Exercises help you practise what you have learned.

Finally, a note concerning the copyright: All screenshots printed in this book are the copyright of SAP SE. All rights are reserved by SAP SE. Copyright pertains to all SAP images in this publication. For simplification, we will not mention this specifically underneath every screenshot.

Source code examples

This book contains many source code examples. To enhance readability in your e-book reader, we recommend that you view the source code in landscape mode.