The BEA AquaLogic Data Services Platform provides a service-based abstraction layer that operates between an organization's data sources and the client applications that need to access data from those sources. It allows developers to model and create reusable data services via drag and drop GUI tools that can access those sources, and in turn can themselves be accessed by client applications; providing for the consuming clients a consistent interface for the access of data from multiple sources.
The data services are created by developers using a metadata-driven process called "Declarative Programming." This process, according to the vendor, allows the developers to define the metadata defining both the services they want as well as the data sources those services are based on; with the platform then automatically providing the data access methodology--including ordering of data source accesses, orchestration of service calls, and generation of SQL queries--as necessary for the execution of the data service. The vendor further states that generated SQL queries, when used, are automatically constructed so as to delegate as much of the query processing to the back-end data source as possible.
