Network Programming Interface

A network programming interface is an application programming interface (API) that contains a set of communications routines or system calls. An application can call these routines to communicate with another application that resides on the same or on different computers. In the context of this discussion, the client and the database server are the applications that call the routines in the TLI or sockets application-programming interface. Clients and database servers both use network programming interfaces to send and receive the data according to a communications protocol.

Both client and database server environments must be configured with the same protocol if client/server communication is to succeed. However, some network protocols can be accessed through more than one network programming interface. For example, TCP/IP can be accessed through either TLI or sockets, depending on which programming interface is available on the operating-system platform. Therefore, a client using TCP/IP through TLI on one computer can communicate with a database server using TCP/IP with sockets on another computer, or vice versa. For an example, see Using a Network Connection.