DPL is an easy way for a CICS® Transaction Server for Windows, CICS on Open Systems, or CICS/400 application program to access DL/I and SQL databases and BDAM files on a remote CICS system. The program simply links to an application program (in the data-owning system) that reads and updates the databases or files.
Another way to access this data is to use distributed transaction programming (DTP) as described in Distributed transaction programming. DTP is more difficult and therefore more costly to develop, but, if well designed, should be more efficient in use.