An asynchronous database API allows threads to call a database and continue to execute without spawning a thread to wait for the database and without polling the database. The API immediately returns to a caller without waiting for a database operation to complete or for any other external event. A call to an asynchronous database API can invoke an initialization method. The initialization method may validate the input parameters, build them into a message for a database operation, send the message to the database server, and return signal information to the client process thread. Signal information provides a client thread with a way to recognize a signal indicating the return of results from a database. Upon completion of a database operation, a thread can call a finalization method to perform any final step to process the database results and pass the formatted results to the thread.