An overview of OData

- The Open Data Protocol ﴾OData﴿ is a data access protocol for the web built on core protocols like HTTP and commonly accepted methodologies like REST for the web.

- OData provides a uniform way to query and manipulate data sets through CRUD operations ﴾create, read, update, and delete﴿.

- Methods for serving OData:
 ~ Manually
 ~ WCF
 ~ WCF Data Services
 ~ MVC
 ~ Web API (the most convenient)

- ASP.NET Web API supports both versions 3 & 4  of the protocol.

- A v4 endpoint can run side-by-side with a v3 endpoint.

- The new OData V4 libraries are in the assembly: System.Web.OData. System.Web.Http.OData are the V3 libraries

- Web API OData does not require Entity Framework. Use any data-access layer that can translate database entities into models.

- It includes features that make it much more ready for the enterprise environment, supporting:
a service definition language
 ~ error message formatting – missing from the documentation at the moment
 ~ dataset paging
 ~ advanced queries
 ~ batch requests

- There are two request and response body formats which are supported, AtomPub and JSON.

- The Azure Storage services & Azure Mobile Services support OData.

- Google's GData protocol which can be used for accessing its services like Calendar, Docs, and YouTube API, has similar features