Data Access

Virtually all corporate IT applications and large-scale Web sites must retrieve, display, and update data stored in a database. But writing even a simple application or Web service to manipulate the data is a complex programming problem because the desired data is usually located in multiple database management systems (DBMSs) and frequently involves different database products and different host OSs. A database with customer names, for example, might be kept in a DB2 database running on an IBM AS/400, while a products database might be stored in SQL Server running on Windows NT. An application that the company uses to ship a product to a customer needs to access both databases efficiently and correctly.

Microsoft has released a series of data access APIs that try to give developers a unified way of accessing diverse data stores and take over the error-prone housekeeping associated with data access.

(For a graphic overview of the Data Access roadmap, see the illustration “Data Access Overview“.)