Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an approach to organizing IT resources and data to meet the changing needs of the business. Implementing SOA depends upon the IT organization being able to build interoperable, robust, reusable, and composable Services that abstract the underlying application functionality and data in the organization. To put this building block vision of SOA into practice requires a solid technical foundation, which includes a persistence layer that facilitates interaction with heterogeneous data sources that store and provide the structured and unstructured information that the enterprise runs upon.

The key to enabling SOA with such a persistence layer, in turn, depends upon abstracting access through data access technology. Technologies such as JDBC, ODBC, and ADO.NET play an integral role in the design and development of a SOA Data Services strategy. With best-of-breed data access technology in place, the organization stands a good chance of succeeding with their SOA efforts. If an organization drops the ball on data access, however, it's unlikely the Services will exhibit the key building block characteristics the organization needs to meet their agility requirements.