The Enterprise Access gateways permit Ingres applications to run against Ingres data and data that resides in foreign relational and non‑relational database management systems. Relational gateways (Enterprise Access and EDBC) provide bridges to relational database management systems such as Advantage CA‑Datacom/DB, Advantage CA‑IDMS/DB, DB2, Oracle, and DB2 UDB. Non‑relational gateways (Enterprise Access and EDBC) provide bridges to non‑relational database management systems, such as IMS, VSAM, CICS/VSAM, and RMS.

The gateway creates and maintains its own system catalogs that are required to support the Enterprise Access interfaces. These system catalogs consist primarily of views drawn from the host DBMS data dictionary and do not interfere with them in any way. The operation of the gateway is transparent to the host DBMS. For more information, see Gateway Catalog Setup.

Enterprise Access enables an application to use a single JDBC driver, a single ODBC driver, or a single .NET Data Provider to access and update information contained in the supported data sources.