Datasources are the backbone of almost all model operations. They provide an abstraction between model logic and the underlying data layer, allowing a more flexible approach to data manipulation. Through this abstraction, CakePHP applications are able to manipulate data without knowing the specifics of how it's stored or fetched.

This chapter shows how to get information from existing datasources, use pre-built datasources to deal with non-relational data, and teaches us how to create a full-featured Twitter datasource.