Question

I will soon work for a company project which will develop a custom .NET application that will integrate with the SAP ERP system.

I virtually know nothing about SAP, so I did some research on the web and found out that it supports multiple types of database.

What I want to know is:

can I directly read SAP tables thru ado.net?

Or is the database behind a web service?

Or is it undetermined because it depends on how the SAP system is implemented?

(the third question comes to my mind after knowing that SAP is not confined to any particular type of database)

Answer 1

As the SAP database tables live in a normal DBMS: Yes, you can read them with ADO.NET. My experience however is that this is not liked very much by the SAP folks.
You can also read the tables through RFC as supported by ERPConnect and possibly others. This will most likely be the way to go.
A third way will be a dedicated RFC component that returns the data you need.