Why should business logic be pushed down to the database layer in HANA-based applications?

Beyond the raw performance benefit of avoiding unnecessary data transfer, pushdown takes advantage of HANA's massively parallel, in-memory computation engine, which is architecturally built to process large volumes of data far faster than row-by-row ABAP processing on the application server ever could.

flowchart LR
    A[Without pushdown] --> B[Millions of rows transferred to app server]
    B --> C[ABAP loops row-by-row: slow]

    D[With pushdown] --> E[Aggregation/filtering runs inside HANA]
    E --> F[Only the small final result set transferred]

Practically, this means favoring CDS Views, native SQL aggregation, and AMDP (ABAP Managed Database Procedures) for computation-heavy logic, over classical patterns that read wide swaths of data into internal tables and loop through them in ABAP. It's a genuine architectural shift in mindset for developers coming from classical ABAP: the database is no longer just "dumb storage" to fetch from, but an active computation engine that should be doing as much of the heavy lifting as possible.