THE OPEN GROUP ADOPTS DRDA AS AN INDUSTRY STANDARD FOR OPEN DATABASE INTEROPERABILITY
DRDA will bolster the database marketplace for existing connectivity products and new interoperability offeringsReading, U.K.--October 26, 1998 --The Open Group, an IT industry consortium for promoting open technologies, announced today that it's members have adopted the Distributed Relational Database Architecture (DRDA) protocol as an industry standard for database access interoperability. "The approval of the DRDA protocol as a standard responds to a specific demand by the customer members of The Open Group", said Allen Brown, COO and Acting President of The Open Group. "It represents another step in creating trust in multi-source interoperability and enabling customer choice with confidence."
The Distributed Relational Database Architecture is an open, published architecture that is already widely implemented, which enables communications between application software and relational database management systems (RDBMS) on disparate hardware platforms using a variety of operating systems. "We offered the initial DRDA specifications, based on IBM research, to The Open Group in order to ensure the long term integrity of customers' solutions. DRDA has proven itself in the marketplace since 1989 in products that provide connectivity to IBM's DB2 family and other databases", states Don Haderle, IBM Fellow and Vice President of Database Technology, IBM Software Solutions. "IBM is committed to providing the highest quality solutions for our customers' business problems and standardization is in the best interest of all customers."
DRDA is a production strength database protocol with superior performance. Each request for database data is associated with a user id so that the database management system processing the request can limit data access to authorized users. Other important DRDA features include support for any SQL dialect, for pre-bound and dynamic SQL, for both single-site and multi-site transactions with coordinated commit and recovery facilities and for stored procedures that return multiple result sets. DRDA also uses available network management alert and focal point mechanisms to provide systems management capabilities and serviceability aids.
For companies using many different database systems--for example, IBM's DB2 on S/390, Oracle on RISC and Microsoft's SQL Server and Access on Intel systems--this standard offers the prospect of true, seamless interoperability. "Boeing has utilized the DRDA protocol as an internal standard for several years to enhance application interoperability across multiple and heterogeneous database management systems", said Jim Presti, Data Management Service Manager at The Boeing Company. "Standards help us reduce variation within our applications, decrease our cost to create and sustain applications and improve the overall quality of the resulting applications. We are very pleased to see that the members of The Open Group have also acknowledged the value of DRDA and that the industry now has a standard for database interoperability."
Many major international companies such as Allstate Insurance, Chrysler, CIGNA Insurance, Ford, Lockheed Martin, McDonald's, Spiegel, Swiss Bank and Wilmington Trust already use products that support DRDA. "The addition of DRDA to The Open Group's library of specifications will be very beneficial to the IT industry", said Tony Gualtieri, Enterprise Architect at Kemper Insurance Companies. "Kemper uses DBMSs from multiple vendors and we need a simple consistent way to obtain and manipulate data from all of these data sources. Multiple gateways work but they complicate the implementation and increase the likelihood of problems. We look forward to the release of additional products that support the DRDA specifications."
Using DRDA, applications and relational databases from different vendors can reside on the same or different hardware platforms using various operating systems. "The DRDA standard should open the market for new growth," said Paul Rampel, President and CEO, StarQuest Software, Inc., one of the founding members of The Open Group's Database Interoperability Workgroup. "The IT budget that used to go to integration and the need for multiple skills can now go to exploring new ideas and developing new business solutions."
The specifications for DRDA will shortly be available on The Open Group Web site at http://www.opengroup.org/publications/catalog/c812.htm (DRDA Volume 1 - Distributed Relational Database Architecture), c813.htm (DRDA Volume 2 - Formatted Data Object Content Architecture) and c814.htm (DRDA Volume 3 - Distributed Data Management).
About The Open Group
The Open Group is a vendor-neutral, international consortium of over 200 members with combined IT budgets in excess of $55 billion annually. It has been the technology industry's flagship specifications, testing and branding organization for over a decade and established many of the open technologies on which billions of dollars of IT systems rely today. The Open Group is working with suppliers and users establishing interoperability requirements across existing multiple platforms, today's new Internet-based technologies, and looking to tomorrow's investment decisions.
Formed in February 1996 by merging X/Open Company Ltd. and the Open Software Foundation, the company's eight sponsors are Compaq Computer Corporation, Hewlett-Packard Company, Siemens AG, Fujitsu Ltd, Hitachi Ltd, International Business Machines Corporation, NCR Corporation, and Sun Microsystems Inc. The Open Group can be reached at www.opengroup.org.
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