41 Parallel Cursor in SAP ABAP
A Parallel Cursor is a classic SAP ABAP performance optimization technique used to process two related internal tables efficiently, particularly as an alternative to expensive nested loops. By sorting both tables on common key fields and maintaining an index "cursor" in the inner table, you can avoid redundant, full-table scans, drastically reducing CPU consumption and execution time.
In a standard nested loop, if you have 10,000 rows in a header table and 50,000 rows in an item table, iterating through them could result in up to 500 million unnecessary comparisons. The parallel cursor solves this by scanning the inner table only once per header record rather than repeatedly looping from the beginning.