[Platform API] Defines the runtime API of the Open Data Access (ODA) extensions. ODA provides the capability to plug any external data source into a data consumer application that supports the ODA framework.

The ODA extension framework defines a set of ODA design-time and run-time interfaces. It adopts the Eclipse plug-in framework for one to provide a designer tool, and a runtime driver for data retrieval. This public API package specifies the Java interfaces of an ODA extension's runtime driver.
An ODA consumer application, such as the BIRT Data Engine, uses the data source connection and data set query definitions specified at design time to access an ODA runtime driver for query execution and data retrieval.

The ODA runtime interfaces are JDBC-like, but have been extended to support additional capabilities of non-RDBMS data sources. An ODA driver would implement the public runtime interfaces, which would in turn wrap data-source-specific APIs, such as web services, to retrieve a result set's data rows.

Below is a brief overview of the API's main interfaces.
The IDriver serves as the entry point to an ODA runtime driver. The driver produces a dedicated IConnection for establishing a connection to the data source provider.
An open connection in turn creates an IQuery to define the specifics of a data set query. A connection also provides meta-data information on the capabilities of the data source, and its supported data set types in IDataSetMetaData.
A query is executed to retrieve one or more IResultSet instances.
A result set is then used to fetch result data. It also provides an IResultSetMetaData for its meta-data information. @since 1.0