Vendor-independent database applications – an architectural approach

Abstract

The ability to switch between different Database Management Systems (DBMS) is a requirement for many database applications in which effort was invested by many researchers. The main obstacle is the non-uniformity across vendors of the SQL language, the de-facto standard in the industry. Also, an application that maps between an object-oriented application and a relation database needs to be designed in a proper way, in order to achieve the required level of performance and maintainability. This paper presents, extends and further details the Vendor-Independent Database Application (VIDA) framework, initially proposed by us in [9]. The proposed VIDA architecture is described in-depth, based on our practice and experience in this field. The design decisions are presented along with supporting arguments. The VIDA architecture presented here aims to fully decouple the application both from the query language and from the database access technology, providing a uniform view of the database. The problems encountered, both during design and implementation, are presented along with their solutions. Also, the available data access technologies and languages are surveyed and their conformity with a standard is debated.