Data Point of the Week #2 – Fast Connections to SaaS Apps

People like fast. Fast cars, fast commutes, fast Internet speeds. What about fast connections to SaaS apps? While this may not seem quite as exciting, being able to quickly connect to your data sources is critical when making business decisions. One way to establish fast connections is through the DataDirect OpenAccess solution, which makes SaaS application data and Cloud data accessible through standards-based APIs. This means that data sources can be accessed through either ODBC, JDBC, and ADO.NET drivers.

Rather than replicating data, OpenAccess exposes a real-time SQL view into the actual SaaS data. The SaaS application is not modified. This means that third-party tools can access the data as if they were accessing a relational database, such as Oracle or SQL Server. You have the ability to use all the features of these tools because the tools think they are connecting to a SQL database. Even a 10 year-old application can then connect to the newest data sources available in the Cloud.

In terms of performance, one of the objectives with this type of connectivity is to reduce how many rows have to be transferred over the Internet. These changes can reduce query times for certain queries from minutes to mere seconds since update and delete operations can be performed in batches. This leads to 30x improvements when updating 100 or more records.

The bottom-line: OpenAccess enables SaaS and Cloud applications to look like a SQL database, supporting standards-based APIs like ODBC, JDBC, and ADO.NET.  To learn more check out our resource page: http://ow.ly/lKrj3.

Stay tuned next week for the third installment of this series (see part one here: http://ow.ly/lKrGV) where we’ll address yet another data access issue!