Understand BizTalk Adapter for SQL Server
The BizTalk Adapter Pack enables service-oriented programmatic access making it possible to interact with an external system. The adapters provide the following advantages to clients:
Consistent design-time experience. The adapters provide a common and user-friendly design-time experience for browsing, searching, and retrieving metadata of LOB artifacts.
Varied programming options. The adapters provide a choice of programming model including the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) channel model, WCF service model, ADO.NET, Web services, or BizTalk supported models.
Uniform experience across LOBs. The adapters standardize on using WCF and the Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Line of Business (LOB) Adapter SDK, and hence provide a uniform experience of gaining access to any LOB system.
As mentioned, the adapters are built on top of the WCF LOB Adapter SDK. The WCF LOB Adapter SDK provides a common basis for building integration adapters that a variety of client applications such as BizTalk Server and Microsoft Office can consume. The WCF LOB Adapter SDK aligns the adapter strategy with the Microsoft Services strategy by exposing integration adapters as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) channels. For more information about the WCF LOB Adapter SDK, see WCF LOB Adapter SDK documentation.
To perform operations on a SQL Server database, adapter clients must have access to relevant tables, procedures, views, scalar functions, and table valued functions. Database tables are the basic unit of storage in the SQL Server database. External applications can select, insert, delete, and update data from a table by using SQL statements. Applications can also access data in the tables by using procedures, views, scalar functions, and table valued functions. With Microsoft BizTalk Adapter for SQL Server, adapter clients can browse artifacts such as tables, procedures, views, and other such items in a SQL Server database. Adapter clients can select the artifacts they require for their solution, and retrieve metadata for those artifacts. This enables users to access and execute the operations on the artifacts in the SQL Server database.
This section lists the features of the SQL adapter.