GNU Data Access (GDA) is an attempt to provide uniform access to different kinds of data sources (databases, information servers, mail spools, etc). It is a complete architecture that provides all you need to access your data, defined by a set of CORBA interfaces as generic as possible (but very powerful at the same time) so that any kind of data source can be accessed through them. libgda is an interface to the GDA architecture, providing a nice wrapper around the CORBA interfaces, for both the client and the server parts. It also provides a bunch of tools to help you both in the development and management of your data sources, all done through the GDA model's set of CORBA interfaces. libgda was part of the GNOME-DB project, but has been separated from it to allow non-GNOME applications to be developed based on it.