Databases store table names, table owners, usernames, column names, column owners, and other related information in the native DBMS catalogs. Enterprise Access builds a set of views on top of the native DBMS catalogs. This provides a standard set of database objects that can be queried and exposes a database metadata interface to the application.

The application may want to obtain a list of tables or views owned by a specific user or schema. To formulate a query, the application must know in what case the DBMS stores its database objects. The three possibilities are UPPER, LOWER, or MIXED.