Most commonly known "enterprise" database systems, such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2 and others are implemented as client/server applications, where the database server is a "back-end" application that services requests from "front-end" client applications. In contrast to this, an embedded database, whether all in-memory or stored on persistent media, is "contained" within a custom application where developers have direct control of the database interface. eXtremeDB allows developers to build client/server as well as embedded database applications with several native language APIs such as C, C++, Java, C#, Python and SQL.
By directly accessing database objects through native programming APIs, embedded applications can often achieve performance far superior to client/server applications which are prey to Inter-Process Communication (IPC) overhead with possible additional network latency.