Heterogeneous Services is a component within the Oracle9i database server that is necessary for accessing a non-Oracle database system.
The term "non-Oracle database system" refers to the following:
- Any system accessed by PL/SQL procedures written in C (that is, by external procedures)
- Any system accessed through SQL (that is, by Oracle Transparent Gateways and Generic Connectivity)
- Any system accessed procedurally (that is, by procedural gateways)
Heterogeneous Services makes it possible for Oracle9i database server users to do the following:
- Use Oracle SQL statements to retrieve data stored in non-Oracle systems.
- Use Oracle procedure calls to access non-Oracle systems, services, or application programming interfaces (APIs) from within an Oracle distributed environment.
Heterogeneous Services is generally applied in one of two ways:
- Users use an Oracle Transparent Gateway in conjunction with Heterogeneous Services to access a particular, vendor-specific, non-Oracle system for which an Oracle Transparent Gateways is designed. For example, you would use the Oracle Transparent Gateway for Sybase on Solaris to access a Sybase database system that was operating on a Sun Solaris platform.
- Users use Heterogeneous Services' generic connectivity to access non-Oracle databases through ODBC or OLE DB interfaces.
Oracle9i Heterogeneous Connectivity Administrator's Guide for more information