  We discuss long-term preservation of and access to relational databases. The
focus is on national archives and science data archives which have to ingest
and integrate data from a broad spectrum of vendor-specific relational database
management systems (RDBMS). Furthermore, we present our solution SIARD which
analyzes and extracts data and data logic from almost any RDBMS. It enables, to
a reasonable level of authenticity, complete detachment of databases from their
vendor-specific environment. The user can add archival descriptive metadata
according to a customizable schema. A SIARD database archive integrates data,
data logic, technical metadata, and archival descriptive information in one
archival information package, independent of any specific software and
hardware, based upon plain text files and the standardized languages SQL and
XML. For usage purposes, a SIARD archive can be reloaded into any current or
future RDBMS which supports standard SQL. In addition, SIARD contains a client
that enables 'on demand' reload of archives into a target RDBMS, and multi-user
remote access for querying and browsing the data together with its technical
and descriptive metadata in one graphical user interface.
