The underlying DBEs of a heterogeneous system are different in nature and may provide different interfaces to the outside world. One of the first challenges in integrating heterogeneous DBEs is to hide the difference in the interfaces these systems expose.

Wrappers have been used ubiquitously in the industry as the approach for doing this. A wrapper is a software module that uses the open (or the proprietary) interface of an underlying DBE and provides a uniform interface to the outside world based on the capabilities that the DBE provides.

Since the de facto standard for query processing in any heterogeneous database system is SQL, a wrapper exposes a relational model and SQL as the interface for the system is wraps. Depending on the capabilities of the underlying component DBEs, wrappers provide different sets of functionalities.

For instance, a relational DBMS wrapper can support all of the capabilities that a relational DBMS provides. An Excel wrapper can provide the ability to enumerate the rows in an Excel worksheet as tuples in a relation. This ability can be utilized to perform a select on the contents of a worksheet very much like performing a select operation on a relation.

As a result, we can use an Excel wrapper to join the rows in an Excel worksheet with the rows of a table exposed by a relational DBMS wrapper. Because of limitations of the BigBook database, a wrapper for the BigBook database can only provide capability of selecting limited information such as business category and the city where the business is located. The BigBook wrapper is not able to provide the capability to enumerate rows and, therefore, cannot support joins.Figure below illustrates a wrapper based architecture for a heterogeneous database system.

As illustrated in Figure, each data source in the system is wrapped by a specific wrapper. Depending on the underlying DBE, a wrapper may be able to provide either tuple level or block level (a set of tuples that are grouped together) access to the information that the database controls.

The wrapper may also be able to cache information outside the database for faster access. According to Wiederhold, wrappers are not directly used by the client of the heterogeneous database system, but interact with a layer of software called the mediator.

The mediator does not have the capability to interface directly to the underlying DBE. The mediator can access the global data dictionary to find out the schema of the local DBEs and the functionality they provide.

The mediator processes the queries that are posted by the global users; determines the location details for each piece of required data for the queries being processed by looking up the details in the GDD; exploits the functionalities that each local DBE provides through its wrapper; and optimizes the queries at the global level.