The SERVICE objects were separate database objects from the underlying tables, views, and procedures that they were exposing.

Network administrators typically have a problem with opening non-standard ports through their firewall, especially to critical resources like database servers…

Even though the HTTP web server component was listening on a separate port from the ODBC/JDBC connections, it still meant opening a port through the firewall and exposing the actual database server process to the open internet.

While this was a nice feature, it had the following negative aspects: ODBC/JDBC client/server connections would come into the server on a TCP/IP port, and HTTP/S connections would arrive through a separate port and be processed by the HTTP listener. Figure 1 below shows that basic architecture. Inside the database, the developer would create separate SERVICE objects that could take a regular SQL query against a table, view, or stored procedure, and transform the result set into a number of formats, including XML, HTML, and JSON. This allowed the database server itself to function as a web server, and it could handle incoming HTTP/s requests. SQL Anywhere actually introduced support for SOAP and REST-based web services back in their version 9.0 release! To enable web access, the server needed to be started with a new commandline switch that started an internal HTTP listener. Note: SA 16.0 is the follow-on release to version 12.0.1. This blog post will cover one specific enhancement, the new support for OData access to SA databases.

SAP and Sybase iAnywhere released SQL Anywhere version 16 in March 2013, and it had many cool new features. It builds upon existing Web technologies, like HTTP and RESTful web services, the Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub), XML, and Javascript Object Notation (JSON).

The OData standard defines a protocol and a language structure for issuing queries and updates to remote data sources, including (but not limited to) relational databases, file systems, content management systems, and traditional web sites. OData is quickly becoming the Lingua Franca for data exchange over the web.

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