It is possible to use the data model separately,however by doing so you'd lose all of the benefits of using the db API....
However, selecting out chunks you need should be quite practical... its all the supporting TCL code you'd lose.
If you're using a J2EE style environment you may want to consider running AOLServer alongside whatever serlvet engine you use (we've done this before with Tomcat)...
You could even represent AOLServer/DBN as an Enterprise Bean serving responses to your servlet engine....
After all, isn't that point of all that Enterprise Bean nonsense ;)
