erpl-rev: SAP Calls Out into DuckDB — 10 Million Rows a Minute
Picture the data team at a mid-sized manufacturer. Every night they need a fresh copy of the FI line items — BSEG and friends — in their lakehouse, where the analysts actually live: DuckDB, Parquet on object storage, the odd Iceberg table. The table is wide (hundreds of columns) and deep (tens of millions of rows), and the window is tight. The "official" answer is SLT: stand up a replication server, license it, configure the per-table settings in LTRS, babysit the queue. It works. It is also a lot of machinery — and budget — for what is, conceptually, "read this table fast and write it somewhere open."
I wanted to know how far the cheap path goes. SAP already exposes a perfectly good remote-function interface; DuckDB already ingests at memory bandwidth. What if ABAP just called out into DuckDB — no extension inside SAP, no SLT, no staging files — and we made the read fast enough to matter?
So I built it — two days, with Claude Code as the pair programmer. The result is erpl-rev, and on a throwaway SAP developer trial (single host, over loopback) it replicated 10,000,000 rows of a 400-column BSEG-shaped table in about a minute. It's an early release — a research prototype we're opening up, not an SLT replacement yet — but the numbers were enough to convince me the cheap path is real. Here is the story, the tools, and the numbers.