A graphical calculation view, as its name suggests, is a graphical editor with building blocks to create a view. We've often seen the concept of building blocks in this book, whereby we create a small initial development which can then be included in a larger one. Graphical calculation views push this concept to its logical conclusion, giving a visual editor to create, organize, and link different blocks together.

This graphical editor is only for our benefit as developers. When we activate our development, it is transformed, as are all objects we create in the SAP HANA Studio, into SQL statements appropriate to SAP HANA. We will see in the next chapter (Chapter 6, You Talking to Me? – Scripted calculation views) that we can achieve the same results by writing the SQL ourselves if we need to do more complex calculations in our views.

In the next few sections we'll create a graphical calculation view, seeing the different types of actions we can perform...