Currently, business tiers for relational database applications are mostly built from software artifacts, among which Java Persistent API, Java Database Connectivity and LINQ are three representatives. Those software artifacts were mostly devised to address the impedance mismatch between the object-oriented and the relational paradigms. Key aspects as reusable business
tier components and access control to data residing inside relational databases have not been addressed. To tackle the two aspects, this research proposes an architecture, referred to here as Business Tier Architecture (BTA), to develop reusable business tier components which enforce access control policies to data residing inside relational databases management systems. Besides BTA, this paper also presents a proof of concept based on Java and on Java Database Connectivity (JDBC).