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:
“To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it—all my life.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major—perhaps the major—stake in the worldwide competition for power. It is conceivable that the nation-states will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory, and afterwards for control over access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor.”
—Jean François Lyotard (b. 1924)