SAP中的client（也叫集团）的意义
---翻译随后就到。就在这里
The Client Concept
Your organization will likely have multiple clients. Clients in the world of SAP are the self-contained business entities or units within your various SAP systems. A client retains its own separate master records and own set of tables. The best way to think of this is in the form of a companywithin a large multinational organization, for example, you might have five or six companies. Each client within SAP represents a different company. Most of the time, you might log in to a particular client or company and do your work; others might log in to a different client or company on the same SAP system, though. In the end, the results can be easily rolled up so that the multinational organization as a whole can easily report on its cross-company financials, for example.
In the same way, an SAP system also tends to maintain different clients strictly for convenience, or to segregate critical data from perhaps less critical data. Here is a general example. When you are first installing SAP and configuring the system, you will likely have a set of systems that you can log in to. Most SAP customer sites maintain a Development system, QA or Test system, and a Production system.
Within each of these systems you can choose the specific client you want to log in to. For instance, within the Development system you might maintain a "business sandbox" or "crash and burn" client along with your workhorse development client and later a copy of this workhorse client, called a "Golden Master" by many. These very distinct client environments within each system enable you to segregate your critical data (important golden development or production client data, for instance) from your test and what-if configuration data.
You might have many clients configured within a particular system. For example, the technical team might implement a new client in your development environment for special developer training purposes, to be used to teach developers how to use the system without actually making any changes to the important development data. This same client configuration is often established in your other systems, toofrom production down to the QA and test systems, and so on.
Regardless of the number of clients, each one is assigned a unique three-digit number, which you are required to know and type at login time. This makes it easy to distinguish between clients. A developer might log in to client 100 to do training, client 200 to review and approve new business logic, and client 500 to conduct actual development activities for the company. In the same way, an end-user might log in to client 300 in the production system to do his day-to-day work, and occasionally client 900 in the QA or Test system to check on the status on new functionality being developed for production.
Watch Out!
Within the SAP world, the term client is used to describe something distinctly different from what the Information Technology (IT) world in general uses it for. In IT, a client represents an individual PC or workstation. For the purposes here, though, I will use client in the manner used by SAPto describe a logical and separate business entity within an SAP system.
