Adaptive Server Enterprise is based on the client-server model. Each Adaptive Server user is associated with a client process that communicates with a server process via a network interface called the Tabular Data Stream (TDS) protocol. The client process may execute on one machine and communicate with a database server on the same or a different machine.

Adaptive Server runs as an application on top of an operating system and depends solely on the services exported by the operating system to function. Adaptive Server uses operating system services for process creation and manipulation, device and file processing, and interprocess communication. The hardware that the operating system runs on is completely transparent to Adaptive Server - Adaptive Server sees only the operating system's user interfaces.