A Literature Survey on ODBAPI and Proposal of Consolidated Database API

Abstract

Cloud computing has gained a lot of traction in the last decade. It has spearheaded a huge paradigm shift in the IT industry with respect to management of resources. Computing resources from storage to servers are offered on a pay-per-use basis. With the virtualization of resources and the pricing policies, development and deployment of applications over cloud has become popular by the means of Platform-As-A-Service (PAAS) architecture. The emergence of cloud computing has also led to the production of a huge amount of data; therefore, a vast array of data-stores to store, access and manipulate this data. Each datastore is specialized for a specific type of data. For a truly dynamic and responsive application, multiple datastores are often used, since a single datastore cannot meet the requirements of complex applications. Each of these datastores has their own data representation model, query language, and interfacing APIs. Learning the semantics of each of these datastores and the syntax of their API is a challenging task for any programmer. In addition to this, different vendors offering PAAS often provide different datastores. Anytime a developer migrates to a different vendor, he must migrate his data from the existing data store to a new unfamiliar one. A simple solution to this heterogeneity is a common unified interface that enables the programmer to perform all the necessary database operations using a simple query language. Doing this decouples the actual database operations from the low-level implementation details of the numerous APIs, thus, providing a comfortable level of abstraction for the user to work with.