Data access

Data access typically refers to software and activities related to storing, retrieving, or acting on data housed in a database or other repository. Two fundamental types of data access exist:

Data access crucially involves authorization to access different data repositories. Data access can help distinguish the abilities of administrators and users. For example, administrators may have the ability to remove, edit and add data, while general users may not even have "read" rights if they lack access to particular information.

Historically, each repository (including each different database, file system, etc.), might require the use of different methods and languages, and many of these repositories stored their content in different and incompatible formats.

Over the years standardized languages, methods, and formats, have developed to serve as interfaces between the often proprietary, and always idiosyncratic, specific languages and methods. Such standards include SQL (1974- ), ODBC (ca 1990- ), JDBC, XQJ, ADO.NET, XML, XQuery, XPath (1999- ), and Web Services.

GNOME-DB

GNOME-DB is a database application by the GNOME community. The project aims to provide a free unified data access architecture to the GNOME project for all Unix platforms. GNOME-DB is useful for any application that accesses persistent data (not only databases, but data), since it now contains a data management API.

Support for GObject Introspection and Vala.

Starting with the 4.2 series, GNOME-DB corresponds to the libgda library.

The libgnomedb library provides "widgets" that allow users to interact with data in databases. It uses the libgda generic database API, so it can use MySQL, Postgres, Sqlite, etc.

GNU Data Access

GNU Data Access (GDA) is a set of plugin APIs, defined as generic as possible, so that any kind of data source can be accessed through them, to provide uniform access to different kinds of data sources (databases, information servers, mail spools, etc.). Similar to Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) or Java Database Connectivity (JDBC), GNU Data Access is a wrapper but with more features to access several database engines. GNU Data Access has been developed as a complete architecture that provides everything required to access data sources.