scope:

ISO/IEC 9579 specifies the OSI Remote Database Access (RDA) Service in terms of

a) the behaviour, as perceived from the OSI environment, of an application-process, called a database server, that provides database storage facilities and database processing services (that is, provides a database management system) to other application-processes; and

b) the behaviour, as perceived from the OSI environment, of an application-process, called an RDA client, that accesses remote database facilities.

This part of ISO/IEC 9579, called the "RDA Generic Standard", specifies the general capabilities of an RDA Service. These generic capabilities are intended to be used for interaction with many different database management systems.

Other parts of ISO/IEC 9579, called "RDA Specialization StandardS", pertain to particular database languages, and augment the RDA Generic Standard by specifying how the generic capabilities of RDA are specialized for each of those database languages.

Thus a complete RDA Service is specified, for a given database language, by the combination of two parts of ISO/IEC 9579, one (this part) of the generic capabilities of RDA and a second (another part) for that particular database language.

The resulting specification is an OSI Application Layer standard.

This part of ISO/IEC 9579 describes the generic capabilities of

a) the model of Remote Database Access (section 2, Model);

b) the RDA Service that supports interaction between the RDA client and the database server - specifically, its communicating part, called the RDA server (section 2, Service);

c) the RDA Protocol by which the RDA client and the database server - specifically, the RDA server - communicate with each other (section 4, Protocol); and

d) the application-contexts of which the RDA Service is a part, including additional rules and the mapping onto underlying services (section 5, Application-contexts).

This part of ISO/IEC 9579 also specifies the rules for defining a specialized RDA Service and constructing an RDA Specialization Standard for it section 6, Specializations).

ISO/IEC 9579 does not specify individual implementations or products, nor does it constrain the implementation of entities and interfaces within a computer system.