Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is gaining momentum in the development community based on its model for creating richer, reusable solutions at lower cost that can adjust to the agile business environments. The solutions built on this principle are composed of services that offer business functionality as a unit or as a whole. These services will access data from different data source types and potentially need to aggregate data from different data source types with different data formats. In this type of environment, handling of different forms of data poses a big challenge for application developers, and the challenge increases in size when you consider the broad diversity of programming models in use. Service Data Objects (SDO) is a specification for a programming model that unifies data programming across data source types and provides robust support for common application patterns in a disconnected way. Although Service Data Objects offer many other capabilities that are very useful for supporting integration with tools and other frameworks, this paper will focus on describing SDOs and how it can be used to handle heterogeneous data sources in SOA environments.