Background processing system has many advantages.
First, when you run a report in the background, the SAP
System is not tied up or blocked. However, if you run the process in the
interactive session, the SAP session, in which the process is running, is
always blocked for any further inputs. On the other hand, in a non-interactive
mode, the R/3 system starts the report in the background. Running the report in
this manner has no influence on your interactive work with the R/3 system.
Second, in background processing of the system you can
schedule the processes, i.e. a report or external program can run at any
scheduled time when R/3 system is active, during the night or other periods of
low load on the R/3 system. Automatic periodic repetition of the jobs can be
scheduled using background-processing system.
Third, background processing is an efficient way to execute
long-running jobs. For interactive sessions, the SAP System has a built-in time
limit. Therefore, whenever a report exceeds that specified limit, the R/3
system terminates the processing of the report automatically. This is the only
way to run long-running ABAP/4 reports. Mostly ABAP/ 4 reports do not require
any scheduling, since such reports are automatically scheduled for execution in
the background system.
