### Introduction

The Asterisk Realtime Architecture is a new set of drivers and functions implemented in Asterisk.

The benefits of this architecture are many, both from a code management standpoint and from an installation perspective.

The ARA is designed to be independent of storage. Currently, most drivers are based on SQL, but the architecture should be able to handle other storage methods in the future, like LDAP.

The main benefit comes in the database support. In Asterisk v1.0 some functions supported MySQL database, some PostgreSQL and other ODBC. With the ARA, we have a unified database interface internally in Asterisk, so if one function supports database integration, all databases that has a realtime driver will be supported in that function.

Currently there are three realtime database drivers:

- ODBC: Support for UnixODBC, integrated into Asterisk The UnixODBC subsystem supports many different databases, please check `www.unixodbc.org` for more information.
- MySQL: Found in the asterisk-addons subversion repository on `svn.digium.com`
- PostgreSQL: Native support for Postgres, integrated into Asterisk