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<concept id="GUID-1AFDDD6F-CB99-587D-A0B5-D3F5B27F7135" xml:lang="en"><title>Concepts</title><prolog><metadata><keywords/></metadata></prolog><conbody><p>This section describes the ideas that underly the Comms Database. </p> <p>The Comms Database provides system wide storage for communications related settings. The Comms Database holds information about Internet Access Providers (IAPs), Internet Service Providers (ISPs), GPRS, modems, locations, charge-cards, proxies, WAP settings etc. The Comms Database holds this information as a set of related tables. </p> <p>Symbian OS defines the format of this information, but the Comms Database can also contain user-defined data. Symbian support for user-defined data is limited to backup and security. </p> <p>Tools and applications that manage voice and data transmissions use the Comms Database. </p> <p>The Comms Database is a persistent store. Tools and applications use the CommsDat API to access the data in the Comms Database. The CommsDat API hides the structure of the data on the database. The CommsDat API also hides the implementation of the database, and allows the implementation to change in future versions of Symbian OS without a change to client code. </p> <p>The current version of Symbian OS implements the Comms Database in the Central Repository. </p> <p>The Comms Database is available on all Symbian platforms. </p> <fig id="GUID-51EC89D3-B9BF-5074-95C7-8C8304626F6E"><image href="GUID-DF83E798-408C-5E69-9520-A733DAEAB788_d0e65751_href.png" placement="inline"/></fig> </conbody><related-links><link href="GUID-00696F18-F1C8-5810-A9F9-E7215CA451A4.dita"><linktext>Configuring comms database using CED</linktext> </link> <link href="GUID-A0948145-32C3-5754-B76D-AD7A8AF001A2.dita"><linktext>Comms database configuration file format</linktext> </link> </related-links></concept>