The Enterprise Access products, also referred to as gateways, are designed to provide access to popular database systems on Windows and UNIX. The Enterprise Access server implements an interface to all of the supported DBMS systems that is similar in appearance and behavior. This allows a single Enterprise Access client application to be used to access each of these data sources. The application does not know about the characteristics of the database system that it is accessing.

This approach allows developers to build portable applications that can be used to access any supported database at run time. Thus, a single application can support access to Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, DB2 UDB, and Ingres. The goal of this guide is to provide developers with the tools and information they need to build such applications.