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By the late 1980s there were a number of efforts underway to provide an abstraction layer for this purpose.

Some of these were mainframe related, designed to allow programs running on those machines to translate between the variety of SQL's and provide a single common interface which could then be called by other mainframe or microcomputer programs.

These solutions included IBM's Distributed Relational Database Architecture ( DRDA ) and Apple Computer's Data Access Language.

Much more common, however, were systems that ran entirely on microcomputers, including a complete protocol stack that included any required networking or file translation support.