ESL Database Services (EDS) is an application programming interface that allows an ESL application to use Structured Query Language (SQL) to retrieve data from or maintain data in a database. EDS handles all communication with the data source on behalf of the ESL application, so you can create an application without targeting a specific vendors' database management system (DBMS). You can use EDS commands to connect to a data source, request and receive results, handle return and error conditions, and terminate the transaction and connection to the data source.

The first part of this section presents the components of the EDS environment and their relationship to each other. The rest of the section describes conformance levels for the database drivers that work with EDS and explains how you can determine the conformance level of the driver you are using.