Migrating Data access resources

Various enterprise information systems (EIS) use different methods for storing data. These backend data stores might be relational databases, procedural transaction programs, or object-oriented databases.

The flexible IBM WebSphere® Application Server provides several options for accessing an information system backend data store:

• Programming directly to the database through the Java DataBase Connectivity (JDBC) API.
• Programming to the transactional backend through various Java EE Connector Architecture (JCA) compliant connectors.
• Programming in the bean-managed persistence (BMP) bean or servlets indirectly accessing the backend store through either the JDBC API or JCA-compliant connectors.
• Using container-managed persistence (CMP) beans.
• Using the IBM data access beans, which also use the JDBC API, but give you a rich set of features and function that hide much of the complexity associated with accessing relational databases.

See Specifications and API documentation for supported versions of data access resources.

Service Data Objects (SDO) simplify the programmer experience with a universal abstraction for messages and data, whether the programmer thinks of data in terms of XML documents or Java objects. For programmers, SDOs eliminate the complexity of the underlying data access technology such as, JDBC, RMI/IIOP, JAX-RPC, and JMS, and message transport technology such as, java.io.Serializable, DOM Objects, SOAP, and JMS.