[Deprecated] Defines the run-time API of BIRT Open Data Access (ODA) extensions.

As of BIRT 2.0, the BIRT ODA run-time framework has been migrated to the Eclipse Data Tools Platform (DTP) project. It is replaced by the org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.oda package.
BIRT 2.0 provides a DTP-to-BIRT ODA adapter plug-in, org.eclipse.birt.data.oda.adapter.dtp, to support existing ODA run-time extensions that implemented the ODA 2.0.x run-time API.

The BIRT Data Engine supports the Open Data Access (ODA) framework. It provides the capability to plug any external data source into the BIRT reporting engine.

The BIRT data 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 during report generation. This API specifies the Java interfaces of an ODA extension's runtime driver.
The BIRT Data Engine uses the data set and data source definitions in a report design and access a data extension's 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 2.0.0 @see org.eclipse.datatools.connectivity.oda