The backing store interface provides the applications programmer with the capability for tagged storage and retrieval of typed data. The tag (or retrieval key) can be either a UUID or a standard C string. For a specific backing store, the data type must be specified at compile time and is established through the IDL encoding services. Each backing store can contain only a single data type.
Each data item (which may also be called a data object, or a data record) consists of the data stored in a single call to a storage routine. The storage routines are dce_db_store( ), dce_db_store_by_name( ), and dce_db_store_by_uuid( ). Optionally, data items may have standard headers. If a backing store has been created to use headers, then every data item has the header.
A program can have more than one backing store open at the same time.