Data Services – Can be ADO.NET or SQL – What’s the difference

Just a while ago I was talking about Data Services and suddenly a confusion between ADO.NET Data Services and SQL Data Services took place, because we were talking about different Data Services, and so in order to try to clarify the differences I remembered to write this post.

There are two types of Data Services that are:

• SQL Data Services
  • Cloud – at this moment is being converted from ACE (Activity, Container and Entity)  to TDS (Tabular Data Stream) as I’ve presented in this post.
  • In this case we are talking about a Database in the Cloud and the ultimate desire will be to just change the ConnectionString used.

• ADO.NET Data Services aka. “Project Astoria”
  • This one is about making available a set of REST Services on top of ADO.NET
    • Highly Extensible:
      • Query Filtering (GET requests)
      • Operation Filtering (PUT, POST, DELETE, etc requests)
      • Making other Operations available with the same capabilities as the ones associated with ADO.NET Data Services.
        • Filter
        • Sort
        • Group
        • Take
        • Skip
        • and so on.
    • This layer can be placed on top of:
      • Entity Framework
      • Linq-to-SQL
      • Custom CLR Objects
  • Where to know more:
    • Overview: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc956153.aspx
    • Sample: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc748663.aspx
  • Offline Version:
    • http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL08/
    • http://blogs.msdn.com/astoriateam/archive/2008/10/22/astoria-futures-offline-enabled-data-services.aspx

Hope it helps you get the confusions out of discussions on this topic.