CData Connect AI vs. CData Python Connectors vs. ThinkSQL vs. XL Feeds 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.

ThinkSQL is a powerful, cross-platform relational database management system designed for modern operating systems and hardware. It aims to comply fully with the ISO SQL standard to provide an open and flexible SQL server for your applications. Compliance with the SQL standard means it supports transactions, sub-selects, views, set operators (union, except, intersect), access privileges and comprehensive referential constraints to ensure the integrity of your data. ThinkSQL uses a multi-versioning engine to provide consistent views of data and concurrent access to rows without locking. The server also has stored procedures and functions (using the standard syntax), and has support for large multimedia objects. It's easy to install, runs on Windows ® and Linux ®, and has native ODBC, JDBC™, dbExpress™ and Python drivers so your applications can connect directly from any platform.