CData API Server vs. CData Connect AI vs. ThinkSQL vs. WinSQL Comparison Chart

CData’s AI offering is centered on Connect AI and associated AI-driven connectivity capabilities, which provide live, governed access to enterprise data without moving it off source systems. Connect AI is built as a managed Model Context Protocol (MCP) platform that lets AI assistants, agents, copilots, and embedded AI applications directly query over 300 data sources, such as CRM, ERP, databases, APIs, with a full understanding of data semantics and relationships. It enforces source system authentication, respects existing role-based permissions, and ensures that AI actions (reads and writes) follow governance and audit rules. The system supports query pushdown, parallel paging, bulk read/write operations, streaming mode for large datasets, and cross-source reasoning via a unified semantic layer. In addition, CData’s “Talk to your Data” engine integrates with its Virtuality product to allow conversational access to BI insights and reports.

WinSQL is a powerful universal database management tool that is used by 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies and more than a million programmers and DBAs around the globe. WinSQL is a generic querying tool that connects to any relational database (RDBMS) for which an Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) driver is available, virtually all RDBMS on the market today. Connect to a variety of databases, including: heavy duty vendors Oracle, MS SQL Server, DB2, Sybase, Informix to lightweight backends like MS Access, DBase, and Text File. Generate royalty-free executables that can be used by your business users to run queries. These can be either static or dynamic queries that pull fresh data from the back-end. Export or simply open any query results into MS Excel with just a click of your mouse. You can even import an existing Excel spreadsheet to a database table by simply dragging an *.XSL file in the catalog tree.