According to a 2013 report issued by global consulting firm McKinsey & Company, The flow of “liquid”open data may contribute a total of three to five trillion dollars to the global economy. Committed to promote the free flow of data, Microsoft Open Tech (China) has become an active participant in the effort to build an Open Data Platform within the China market. MS Open Tech (China) not only contributed an OData plug-in to CKAN, the world’s leading open-source data portal platform to accelerate the China government Open Data initiative, but also to showcase the broader achievements of this effort at the Juhe Data Developers Conference, held on Oct 17 in 2014.
Today, MS Open Tech (China) has released an important update to this tool, formally called the OData Producer Codegen for JDBC plugin. This tool was designed to further enable the free flow and utilization of data between XX. With it, Chinese data service providers using JDBC will now be able to more easily add OData APIs for their own data to support interoperability with the data processing tools, such as Microsoft Office Excel and Power BI, familiar tool sets for data scientists, knowledge workers, researchers, and others.
“Open data standards and interoperability draw lots of attention from both local (Chinese) and global enterprises and government agencies.” said Yun Langsheng, Managing Director of Microsoft Open Technologies (China). “As a strong contributor to global open data standards and interoperability, Microsoft Open Tech has delivered a lot of support and made great contribution to OData and open source projects to help data providers, users and developers leverage various data sources more easily. OData Producer Codegen for JDBC aims help intellectual professionals leverage familiar tools such as Office and Power BI to more easily mine the data ‘buried’ behind JDBC. Eventually, we hope to see data flow more freely, both in China and around the world.”
“Microsoft OData protocol has infused new blood to Juhe Data,” said Zuo Lei, Juhe Data CEO. “Its JDBC interface function works especially well, which has helped greatly improve our development efficiency and save the time required. We plan to base more of our interface development work on OData in the future.”
JDBC - The Data Gold Mine
Java Data Base Connectivity (JDBC), a Java API used to perform SQL sentences, can provide universal access to different relational databases. JDBC is composed of a set of Java-written categories and interfaces, and provides a baseline for building advanced tools and interfaces so that database developers can develop database applications for automatic data import of data processing software.
As one of the most popular database connectivity protocols, JDBC is widely used by data service providers today to manage and access back-end databases. Most well-known data sharing and transaction platforms within China have adopted JDBC to manage their back-end databases access and operations. The free flow of data is largely dependent on the accessibility of back-end data, as well as how may be obtained and used by third parties. However, customized APIs might be a less efficient approach given a large quantity of data and timeliness of the request. As a result, a large portion of the data may still been buried, presenting a challenge as to how it may be possible to add OData APIs to various databases automatically and more efficiently.
OData Producer Codegen for JDBC: Magic Hand for Tapping the Data Gold Mine
This tool is designed in response to the requirements of data providers, to avail batches of data to users from JDBC enabled data service providers. The tool, upon one-key click after simple configuration, can largely reduce the workload of data service providers by adding data stored on the JDBC data sources to OData Restful APIs automatically. As a result, large amount of data becomes accessible immediately.
For any question or suggestions, please feel free to reach us at msopentechcn[at]microsoft[dot]com. We look forward to hearing from you!
Emily Chen
Technical Evangelist
Microsoft Open Technologies China