Why is a data table transparent?

If you often develop sap reports, you will not be unfamiliar with transparent tables. You can perform various standard data table operations on transparent tables. To obtain a report development requirement, you only need to find the relevant transparent table, you can start developing reports. But there must be a lot of friends who may feel very strange about the definition of a transparent table-it is a physical table that stores actual data. Why is it "Transparent?

This starts with interpreting the word "Transparent. Transparency refers to the passage of light, such as glass and clear water. In modern science, the term has been extended to explain abstract scientific and technological concepts, referring to things that can be ignored from the perspective of users, most of these transactions are logical communication protocols. For example, the TCP/IP protocol can be viewed as transparent when we access a website, and the GSM/CDMA protocol can be viewed as transparent when we use mobile phones, cable TV protocol can be seen as transparent when we watch TV ...... In this way, we can easily understand the transparent table.

Transparent tables refer to tables with identical structure definitions in the database in the ABAP dictionary. That is to say, for transparent tables in the ABAP, a database table with the same name must exist in the background database, in addition, the number and name of fields in the two tables are identical. Because of this feature, all data operations on transparent tables in the ABAP dictionary are equivalent to operations on database tables directly. This is what "Transparent" means.
However, since version R/3 4.0, the field order of the transparent table in the ABAP dictionary may be different from that in the database, however, this inconsistency does not affect the use of the select * syntax to read data from the database table. At this time, the field order will be automatically rearranged by the ABAP runtime environment according to the definition in the ABAP dictionary.