Editing Database abstraction layer (section)

== Database abstraction in the API ==
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 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 negligible overhead.

Popular use for database abstraction layers are among [[object-oriented programming]] languages, which are similar to API-level abstraction layers. In an object-oriented language like C++ or Java, a database can be represented through an [[Object (computer science)|object]], whose methods and members (or the equivalent thereof in other programming languages) represent various functionalities of the database. They also share advantages and disadvantages with API-level interfaces.