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A '''database abstraction layer''' is an [[application programming interface]] which unifies the communication between a computer application and [[database]]s such as [[MSSQL|SQL Server]], [[IBM DB2|DB2]], [[MySQL]], [[PostgreSQL]], [[Oracle database|Oracle]] or [[SQLite]]. Traditionally, all database vendors provide their own interface tailored to their products, which leaves it to the application programmer to implement code for all database interfaces he or she would like to support. Database abstraction layers reduce the amount of work by providing a consistent API to the developer and hide the database specifics behind this interface as much as possible. There exist many abstraction layers with different interfaces in numerous programming languages. If an application has such a layer built in, it is called '''database-agnostic'''.<ref>http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com/definition/database-agnostic</ref>
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Libraries unify access to databases by providing a single low-level programming interface to the application developer. Their advantages are most often speed and flexibility because they are not tied to a specific query language (subset) and only have to implement a thin layer to reach their goal. As all [[SQL]] dialects are similar to one another, application developers can use all the language features, possibly providing configurable elements for a database-specific cases, such as, typically, user-IDs and credentials. A thin-layer allows the same queries and statements to run on a variety of database products with a negligible overhead.
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