Preface – This post is part of the Differences in ABAP for Interviews series.

Introduction

SAP has always been all about data. Since its evolution, SAP has deployed so many ways to play around data. It is also important for any business to access, transfer and store its data from internal and external sources. Keeping these things in mind, SAP has introduced (in different timelines) different ways to process data transfer. In this article, we will be focusing upon three of them as well the difference between SAP BDC, BAPI and OData.

SAP BDC

SAP BDC stands for Batch Data Communication, is an application interface framework, used to process batch input sessions resulting into batch data transfer. They are also simply called Batch Input.

SAP BAPI

SAP BAPI stands for Business Application Programming Interface, are RFC function modules that enables external applications to access, process, migrate and store data in SAP. External applications mainly communicate with SAP using HTTP gateway.

SAP OData

SAP OData is a web gateway that converts SAP business data into a REST API. This REST API is capable of performing Create, Read, Update and Delete (CRUD) operations using HTTP gateway.

Difference between SAP BDC, BAPI and OData