OData and Federations: yes you can… Just ask Maxim
In case you guys have not seen this; Maxim Glukhankov has a new sample on codeplex that shows how to set up OData on top of SQL Azure Federations. Just go under “Source Code” at the top and download!
Not every tool in the world natively understand federations today. OData simplifies life for a lot of the tools that can’t speak ‘sqlfederations’ yet and the list of OData consumers is full with great names like Excel! be able to query your federated data using Excel now that should appeal to many!
You can find the full list here; https://www.odata.org/consumers
Browsers IE, Chrome, Safari etc; Most modern browsers allow you to browse Atom based feeds. Simply point your browser at one of the OData Producers.
Excel 2010 : PowerPivot for Excel 2010 is a plugin to Excel 2010 that has OData support built-in.
Client Libraries : Client libraries are programming libraries that make it easy to consume OData services. We already have libraries that target: Javascript, PHP, Java, Windows Phone 7 Series, iPhone (Objective C) and .NET. For a complete list visit the OData SDK.
OData Helper for WebMatrix: The OData Helper for WebMatrix and ASP.NET Web Pages allows you to easily retrieve and update data from any service that exposes its data using the OData Protocol.
Tableau : Tableau - an excellent client-side analytics tool - can now consume OData feeds
Telerik RadGrid for ASP.NET Ajax : RadGrid for ASP.NET Ajax supports automatic client-side databinding for OData services, even at remote URLs (through JSONP), where you get automatic binding, paging, filtering and sorting of the data with Telerik Ajax Grid.
Telerik RadControls for Silverlight and WPF : Being built on a naturally rich UI technology, the Telerik Silverlight and WPF controls will display the data in nifty styles and custom-tailored filters. Hierarchy, sorting, filtering, grouping, etc. are performed directly on the service with no extra development effort.
Telerik Reporting : Telerik Reporting can connect and consume an existing OData feed with the help of WCF Data Services.
Database .NET v3 : Database .NET v3 - A free, easy-to-use and intuitive database management tool, supports OData
Pebble Reports : Pebble Reports lets you create reports consisting of tables, charts and crosstabs. Reports can be exported to Word, Excel and PDF formats, or emailed via Outlook.