This page provides a starting point for finding information about data access. 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:
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.
Data persistence is the ability to maintain data between application executions. Persistence is vital to enterprise applications because of the required access to relational databases. Applications that are developed for this environment must manage persistence themselves or use third-party solutions to handle database updates and retrievals with persistence. The Java Persistence API (JPA) provides a mechanism for managing persistence and object-relational mapping and functions for the EJB 3.0 and EJB 3.1 specifications.
Support for transactions is provided by the transaction service within WebSphere Application Server. The way that applications use transactions depends on the type of application component.