OData at Information on Demand 2012

I attended IBM’s Information on Demand conference two weeks ago, where I had the opportunity to talk to people about OData (Open Data Protocol). Microsoft and IBM are collaborating on the development of the OData standard in the OASIS OData Technical Committee, and for this conference we were demonstrating a simple OData feed on a DB2 database, consumed by a variety of client applications.

Here’s a high-level view of the architecture of the demo app:

For this demo, we deployed an OData service on Windows Azure that exposes a few entities from a DB2 database running on IBM’s cloud platform. By leveraging WCF Data Services in Visual Studio, we were able to create this OData feed in a matter of minutes.

Here’s a screencast that shows the steps involved in creating the demo service and consuming it from various client devices and applications:

For more information about using OData with DB2 or Informix, see “Use OData with IBM DB2 and Informix” on the IBM DeveloperWorks site.

The growing OData ecosystem is enabling a variety of new scenarios to deliver open data for the open web, and it was great to have the opportunity to learn from so many perspectives this week! Standardizing a URI query syntax and semantics means that data providers and data consumers can focus on innovative ways to add value by combining disparate data sources, and assures interoperability between a wide variety of data producers and consumers. To learn more about OData, including the ecosystem, developer tools, and how you can get involved, see this blog post.

Special thanks to Susan Malaika, Brent Gross, and John Gera of IBM for all of their help with putting together the demo and their support at the booth throughout the conference. We’re looking forward to continued collaboration with our colleagues at IBM and the many other organizations involved in the ongoing standardization of OData!