METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR ACCESSING A RELATIONAL DATABASE WITHOUT EXITING AN OBJECT-ORIENTED ENVIRONMENT

The method and apparatus of the present invention permit accessing a relational database outside of an object-oriented environment without exiting the object-oriented environment. A requestor object located in the object-oriented environment sends a data access message requesting data located in a relational database outside of the object-oriented environment. This message is sent to an interface which creates a data object containing instance variables to hold results from the data access request. The interface executes a data access routine and the results are placed into the data object with the results being sent to the requestor object by sending the requestor object a pointer to the data object.