Data is the life blood of the enterprise. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) demands access to data stored in heterogeneous data sources. An explicit data services layer is essential to exposing data locked away in legacy systems. Alternate approaches to data access, such as Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs), CORBA and Hibernate, each demand a different approach to taking data out of repository; this results in SOA efforts being spent on data access, rather than implementing business functionality. Service-enabling of data - or Data Services - essentially takes away the effort of developing similar data accessing mechanisms for different applications and thus removing bottle-necks within a SOA.