Data access typically refers to software and activities related to storing, retrieving, or acting on data housed in a database or other repository. There are two types of data access, sequential access and random access.
Data Access is simply the authorization you have to access different data files. Data access can help distinguish the abilities of Administrators and users. E.g. Admin’s may be able to remove, edit and add data while a general user may not be able as they don’t have the access to that particular file.
Historically, different methods and languages were required for every repository, including each different database, file system, etc., and many of these repositories stored their content in different and incompatible formats.
In more recent days, standardized languages, methods, and formats, have been created to serve as interfaces between the often proprietary, and always idiosyncratic, specific languages and methods. Such standards include SQL, ODBC, JDBC, XQJ, ADO.NET, XML, X Query, X Path, and Web Services.
Some of these standards enable translation of data from unstructured (such as HTML or free-text files) to structured (such as XML or SOL).
Famous quotes containing the words data and/or access:
“This city is neither a jungle nor the moon.... In long shot: a cosmic smudge, a conglomerate of bleeding energies. Close up, it is a fairly legible printed circuit, a transistorized labyrinth of beastly tracks, a data bank for asthmatic voice-prints.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“A girl must allow others to share the responsibility for care, thus enabling others to care for her. She must learn how to care in ways appropriate to her age, her desires, and her needs; she then acts with authenticity. She must be allowed the freedom not to care; she then has access to a wide range of feelings and is able to care more fully.”
—Jeanne Elium (20th century)