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Are these actual numbers? If so, you've got me curious! How does it work? Do you really have billions of lines of code? How many of those 580k tables are auto g

Are these actual numbers? If so, you've got me curious! How does it work? Do you really have billions of lines of code? How many of those 580k tables are auto generated?

menotyou 5y ago
This is a standard SAP system. I just checked the numbers before I put them down here. SAP has been around since the late 80ies and is open source and very little of the code has been officially retired, so the amount of code and number of tables are monotonically growing for 4 decades. Lot's of redundant programs as well. So the code base is huge and the database is of course not completely normalized. SAPs program environment comes with a built in editor and a relational database, and that the metadata of every table is stored in the database and the program is not stored on the file system but in the database as well. (Which makes tools like github superflous. When you edit code it gets a lock on the database). So conveniently in SAP there is a database tables which holds all database tables and another table for all fields. Likewise there is a table for all programs and SAP stores all program lines in another database table. So you just need count the number of entries in these tables. I am not aware of any generated tables, but maybe are some. Maybe 5%. I'd estimate that maybe half of the programs are actually generated code. Whereas "program" probably is not accurate, some of the programs are modules or function pools which are invoked by other programs.
- menotyou 5y ago
  I made some further research today because i wonderd myself. I think the number of generated programs is higher then my estimation. I assess that the number of not generated programs are in the ballpark of 500k and the number of transparent database tables around 300k. The rest of the are views defined on the database but not transparent table. The numbers are smaller than initially given, but still big enough for not being handled with unstructured databases.

Are these actual numbers? If so, you've got me curious! How does it work? Do you really have billions of lines of code? How many of those 580k tables are auto generated?

menotyou 5y ago

This is a standard SAP system. I just checked the numbers before I put them down here. SAP has been around since the late 80ies and is open source and very little of the code has been officially retired, so the amount of code and number of tables are monotonically growing for 4 decades. Lot's of redundant programs as well. So the code base is huge and the database is of course not completely normalized. SAPs program environment comes with a built in editor and a relational database, and that the metadata of every table is stored in the database and the program is not stored on the file system but in the database as well. (Which makes tools like github superflous. When you edit code it gets a lock on the database). So conveniently in SAP there is a database tables which holds all database tables and another table for all fields. Likewise there is a table for all programs and SAP stores all program lines in another database table. So you just need count the number of entries in these tables. I am not aware of any generated tables, but maybe are some. Maybe 5%. I'd estimate that maybe half of the programs are actually generated code. Whereas "program" probably is not accurate, some of the programs are modules or function pools which are invoked by other programs.

menotyou 5y ago
I made some further research today because i wonderd myself. I think the number of generated programs is higher then my estimation. I assess that the number of not generated programs are in the ballpark of 500k and the number of transparent database tables around 300k. The rest of the are views defined on the database but not transparent table. The numbers are smaller than initially given, but still big enough for not being handled with unstructured databases.