More often today, the owner of the data makes money by using the Internet’s easy access to that data to lower the friction of existing business processes, such as removing human employees from airline reservation systems or overnight package delivery tracking. Accessing remote data over the Internet is primarily why you have a PC today.

Certainly an enormous amount of data resides in large relational database programs such as Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle9i, but the data that an Internet application uses can and often does reside in many other locations. Some of these sources will be familiar to you, and only the notion of easy remote access will be new.

We can’t take the time to learn different programming models for every conceivable data store: one for SQL Server, a different one for Oracle, yet another for Excel— and heaven knows what programmatic interface those electric power guys are exposing to clients.

XML makes an excellent wire format for transporting data from one computer system to
another because it’s widely supported and free of implementation dependencies. Our data access strategy needs to go into and out of XML easily.