Question

Your engineering team wants to connect Claude to your company's internal PostgreSQL database and a Google Drive folder using the Model Context Protocol (MCP). A developer asks you to clarify the architecture: which component actually exposes the database and Drive as accessible resources, and which component the Claude-powered application uses to consume them?

Accepted Answer

An MCP server exposes each data source (the database and Drive), and the Claude application acts as an MCP client that connects to those servers to access the resources.

Answer

An MCP client wraps each data source, and the Claude application runs an MCP server to pull data from those clients.

Answer

Both the data sources and the Claude application must run MCP servers, which communicate directly with each other without any client.

Answer

The Claude model itself becomes the MCP server, and the data sources connect to it as clients over the API.