Patent ID: 7849067

Claim:
A system comprising: one or more computer-readable storage media; one or more applications stored on the one or more computer-readable storage media; a querying/scheduling system embodied on the one or more computer-readable storage media, the querying/scheduling system being configured to present a common set of application program interfaces (APIs) that can be used by the one or more applications to access different data sources and have data stored in the data sources returned to the one or more applications, wherein at least some individual data sources store data in different formats and can have their own specific access mechanisms of which said one or more applications are unaware; and one or more data providers embodied on the one or more computer-readable storage media, individual data providers being associated with individual data sources and being knowledgeable of how to access data stored in an associated data source, wherein: the querying/scheduling system comprises a data model that can create the one or more data providers; and at least some of the data providers can be created on a thread that is a same thread as the data model.