Distributed Relational Database Architecture (DRDA) is a database interoperability standard from

The Open Group The Open Group is a global consortium that seeks to "enable the achievement of business objectives" by developing " open, vendor-neutral technology standards and certifications." It has 900+ member organizations and provides a number of services ...

. DRDA describes the architecture for distributed relational databases. It defines the rules for accessing the distributed data, but it does not provide the actual

application programming interface An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software Interface (computing), interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that des ...

s (APIs) to perform the

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. It was first used in DB2 2.3. DRDA was designed by a work group within IBM in the period 1988 to 1994. The messages, protocols, and structural components of DRDA are defined by the

Distributed Data Management Architecture Distributed Data Management Architecture (DDM) is IBM's open, published software architecture for creating, managing and accessing data on a remote computer. DDM was initially designed to support record-oriented files; it was extended to support ...

Components

* Application Requester (AR). The AR accepts

SQL Structured Query Language (SQL) (pronounced ''S-Q-L''; or alternatively as "sequel") is a domain-specific language used to manage data, especially in a relational database management system (RDBMS). It is particularly useful in handling s ...

requests from an application and sends them to the appropriate application servers for processing. Using this function, application programs can access remote data. * Application Server (AS). The AS receives requests from application requesters and processes them. The AS acts upon the portions that can be processed and forwards the remainder to database servers for subsequent processing. The AR and the AS communicate through a protocol called the ''Application Support Protocol'' which handles data representation conversion. * Database Server (DS). The DS receives requests from AS or other DS servers. The DS supports distributed requests and will forward parts of the request to collaborating DS in order to fulfill the request. The AS and the DS among themselves communicate through a protocol called the ''Database Support Protocol''.

Databases supporting DRDA

* Apache Derby (Java RDBMS) * IBM Db2 *

Informix Dynamic Server Informix is a product family within IBM's Information Management division that is centered on several relational database management system (RDBMS) and multi-model database offerings. The Informix products were originally developed by Informi ...

v11.10 * Oracle Database Gateway for DRDA - enables Oracle database to act as a DRDA client, accessing remote non-Oracle databases (primarily DB2) * Oracle Database Provider for DRDA - enables Oracle database to act as a DRDA server, providing Oracle database access to remote clients (e.g. IBM i systems using DB2/400 DRDA client library)

External links

The OpenGroup - DRDA Protocol description
Open Group standards SQL data access Application layer protocols Database access protocols {{database-stub