Modern date-related applications span across a wide variety of scenarios, which concern the consumption of data coming from sources that are no more limited to relational databases, but cover an ever-expanding list of data services. They may report data fetched from a service of a CRM application, or display demographical information for healthcare applications fetched from a public ODATA service, and so on. Different sources support different ways of accessing them, so interacting with a multitude of them can be a challenging task, necessitating the development and maintenance of a common connectivity interface.

DataConnectors are service components that can be used for effective data connectivity built over ADO.NET architecture. They are high-performance data providers which enable a common interface for accessing different kinds of data sources, based on established data-access technologies. They effectively hide the complexity of performing connections and transactions in a different way per data source, enabling the productive development of data-related applications. The image below depicts a simplified architecture of the DataConnector library.