Enterprise Access
Enterprise Access is a middleware solution that provides organizations with the flexibility and integration to access information resources from a wide array of platforms and data sources. It enables users to protect their investments in hardware, training and critical business applications by presenting a uniform interface for Ingres® applications such as Ingres® JDBC, ODBC. Python Driver, .Net Data Provider, and embedded SQL, OpenAPI, and OpenROAD® for access to non-Ingres data sources.
Top Features
- Single Client Interface
- Data Warehousing
- Transparent SQL Access
- Transactional Web Application Support
- READ/WRITE Access
- Protects Existing Investments
Meeting the Challenges of Today's Business Landscape
Typically, current enterprise corporate information systems' infrastructure network consists of a complex mixture of multi-vendor hardware and software, where data is stored in various formats, file locations and operating environments. Additionally, as electronic commerce has become a common standard making it mandatory for these networks' data to include connections with other organizations. Business systems should reflect not only an organization's core business strategy, but also address the need to adopt ongoing changes that will occur. Attaining this can be complex, given that such realities as mergers, acquisitions and partnerships dictate that key business data must be easily retrievable and accessible across multiple computing environments.
Reduced complexity and increased productivity is also mandatory for organizations in order to ensure that quality of service meets the needs of users and customers. The need to understand the low-level details of multiple data storage systems can be a daunting task and candidates with the required skill sets are hard to find; excessive retraining of existing staff can be costly and time consuming. Solutions that help perform multiple daily tasks and enable organizations to maximize productivity are required in order for IT systems to help manage an organization's overall effectiveness and ability to generate profits.
A Straightforward and Technology-Insulated Approach
To help meet these challenges, Ingres Corporation provides Enterprise Access, a gateway designed to provide access to popular database systems on multiple platforms. The Enterprise Access server implements a consistent interface irrespective of the supported DBMS systems, enabling a single client application to be used to access each data source. By shielding users from technology specifications of database systems, Enterprise Access employs an approach that can be used to access any supported database at runtime from a single application design—Ingres, MS SQL Server, Oracle or DB2 UDB.
The benefits provided by Enterprise Access help organizations meet the challenges required to stay competitive in today's business world, including protecting existing investments, increasing access to information for electronic commerce and data warehousing, increasing productivity, assuring a smooth transition in system rightsizing and simplifying implementation.
Distinctive Features and Functionalities
Protecting Existing Investments
Enterprise Access protects and leverages existing investments by providing transparent access to disparate data sources. This transparency helps ensure that access to existing data can be maintained in an open systems environment, making the data open and portable to other applications. More significantly, continuous new technology is easily exploited ensuring a standard and cost effective way to leverage these existing investments.
Single Client Interface
Enterprise Access provides a common, portable, open interface that is compatible with a number of operating environments while maintaining consistent access to enterprise-wide data across diverse environments. Applications can be written to the Ingrs OpenSQL dialect to maximize portability and efficiency.
Data Warehousing
The means to integrate information across diverse systems assists in the creation of a data warehouse enabling easier access to corporate information among departments for decision-support applications. This helps information on client profiles, markets, costs and distribution avenues to be better analyzed and used to their full advantages.
Enabling E-Commerce
Enterprise Access enables the construction of a solid information backbone that models the enterprise and integrates electronic commerce links quickly and successfully.
Marked Productivity Gains
With a single, common SQL interface to data, Enterprise Access solutions increase application productivity and eliminate the need to use proprietary navigation languages for each individual database. Unlike other gateway and middleware products, Enterprise Access unleashes the power of choice for flexibility and benefits such as interchangeable clients and data sources, and reusable applications.
Transparent SQL Access
Enterprise Access products allow you to have a common, portable, open interface across a variety of operating environments while maintaining access to your existing data. Existing data storage systems can be mapped to a table-based relational data storage model providing benefits of SQL access, such as eliminating the programming of navigation through the data into an application.
Simple to Implement
Organizations save time and cost by setting up an integrated enterprise-wide information system using Enterprise Access. Because of its open design and transparency, no database specific programming is required for client/server systems. This straightforward implementation enables applications to be run against existing corporate data quickly.
READ/WRITE Access
Real time, READ/WRITE SQL access to diverse data is provided, ensuring full transaction consistency and data integrity. All SQL requests to databases are preserved as transactions; native database security, optimization, logging, locking, full rollback and recovery remain intact and are administered by the native system.
Choice of Development Options
There are numerous options for actual development that integrate with Enterprise Access, including Ingres Corporations' powerful database development environment, OpenROAD. OpenROAD provides a fast, efficient method for building mission-critical applications for multiple platforms using any of a number of data sources, all from a single set of developer skills.
Supported Environments
Operating Systems and Databases
A complete list of the operating systems that Enterprise Access runs on, and the databases that Enterprise Access integrates with, is available in the "Complete Product/Platform List" on the Ingres Product Availability page.
Client Interfaces
Enterprise Access supports the following Ingres client interfaces:
- OpenROAD
- JDBC
- ODBC
- Python Driver
- .Net Data Provider
- OpenAPI
- Embedded SQL support
Enterprise Access products allow an application to be used to access different data sources with no code changes. The Ingres Visual DBA tool interoperates with Enterprise Access allowing schemas to be examined and objects (table definitions, data and view) to be copied between different data sources.
Implementation Strategies
Client/Server
The Enterprise Access family can be configured as a client/server system. Enterprise Access resides on the host system with client access on the network provided by Ingres Net. Ingres Net provides full location transparency to the client application so that neither the appli-cation nor the user need have knowledge of data location or network topology.
Worldwide Web
Enterprise Access solutions can be used to provide web page access to legacy data on the mainframe, midrange, or open system platforms. Using Ingres Web Deployment Option, the Enterprise Access solutions provide access to disperse enterprise data from Web browsers on the internal and external network. Enterprise Access, combined with the OpenROAD Server or JBoss, allows web services to access different data sources.
Distributed Database Access
An Ingres Distributed Option heterogeneous distributed database system allows you to share company-wide data transparently throughout your organization. The Ingres Distributed Option information manager provides optimized access to multiple databases simultaneously. Using Ingres Distributed Option, Ingres Net, Ingres Server and Enterprise Access, you can perform distributed joins between Ingres data and other data in your organization using regular SQL syntax, without the need for custom application code. By adding many members of the Enterprise Access or EDBC family to the configuration, you can consolidate your relational and non-relational data into a single, logical view.
Data Replication
If your open systems strategy involves data that has been offloaded from a central database to distributed database servers, you can use the Ingres Replicator Option to replicate any updates and inserts committed on distributed Ingres databases through Enterprise Access to your heterogeneous databases. The Ingres Replicator Option copies data to predetermined sites on a transaction-by-transaction basis with complete transparency to the applications on the sending and receiving database servers. Using the Ingres Replicator Option is beneficial in situations where data is copied out of a central database to distributed servers for maintenance or to achieve better performance. Although the update originates at a remote site, the host data is kept current through the use of the Ingres Replicator Option and Enterprise Access. By propagating data changes through Enterprise Access, your central data remains current and produc-tive while becoming part of a distributed client/server database solution for the entire enterprise.
All trademarks, trade names, service marks, and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.