Is there a generic oData provider for SQL Server?

Question

I've created a gadget for our CRM consultants that allows them to present data from an oData source in CRM. At the moment, it will connect to any data source but for customer sites we need to develop an oData service using WCF each time for each data source.

Does anyone know if there's a decent generic tool out there that can retrieve data from SQL Server, present it (via IIS) as oData and that can be configured without Visual Studio by a non-developer?

Answer 1

We (the WCF Data Services team) have heard this ask a couple of times; what follows are a few of my thoughts in no particular order.

1. We haven't heard the ask a lot. There's a reasonable amount of work to do here, and without sufficient asks it's hard to justify. That said, there's nothing stopping the community from spinning up an effort to achieve this (hint, hint :)).
2. There's a number of questions you would need to answer. For instance, what sort of default limitations would the provider have? Would you really want to allow arbitrary expands on something that's probably a production database server? What about permissions? What about read/write?
3. What happens for mutable schemas? Is this a completely dynamic provider? How much overhead is there in scanning the database schema, and how frequently would the database schema need to be scanned?
4. How would clients take advantage of a dynamic OData service? Most clients use some form of code generation to make interacting with the service easier.

These thoughts aren't really intended to dissuade at all, but hopefully they give you some things to think about should you attempt to create a generic provider on your own. If you do so, I'd love to hear about it.