Here are some things that have piqued my interest on the interwebs over the last few days. Parameterized queries and Security in Data Explorer Chris Webb put a post up on the Data Explorer forum asking about parameterizing queries in Data Explorer and Miguel Llopis from the Data Explorer product team replied with some useful information: ...

To my mind the most interesting piece of news to come out of the recent PASS conference was the unveiling of a new SQL Azure Labs project coming from the SQL Server organisation that has the codename ''Data Explorer'' (not a very imaginitive codename I'm sure you'll agree) and for which there is information available at ...

A little over a month ago, I wrote an article (Is There Such a Thing as Easy ETL) about expressor software and their desktop ETL application, expressor Studio. I wrote about how it seemed much easier than the native ETL tools in SQL Server when I was reading up on the tool, but that the ''proof would be in the pudding'' so to speak when I ...

Chris Sells announced on twitter earlier today that the schedule for the upcoming Professional Developers' Conference (PDC) has been published as an OData feed at: http://odata.microsoftpdc.com/ODataSchedule.svc Whoop-de-doo! Now we can, get this, view the PDC schedule as raw XML rather than on a web page or in Outlook or on our phone, how ...

A couple of months back I wrote a blog post entitled Microsoft, OData and RDF where I gave a high level view of the OData protocol and how it compares to RDF. I talked about linked data, triples and such like which may have been somewhat useful however jargon-heavy. Earlier today Dr Michael Hausenblas (blog | twitter) offered an analogy which I ...

The OData website at http://www.odata.org/home has been updated today to provide a much more engaging page than the previous sterile attempt. Moreover its now chockful of information about the progress of OData including a blog, a list of products that produce OData feeds plus some live OData feeds that you can hit up today, a ...

Earlier today Chris Webb posted a blog entry entitled OData and Microsoft BI where he remarked upon the increasing importance of Microsoft’s burgeoning OData protocol for accessing data over HTTP. Chris also linked to Douglas Purdy’s blog post OData: The Movie which listed the following Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies that support (or ...

There was lots of news that came out of Microsoft’s recent Professional Developer Conference (PDC) event however one item that may have slipped under the radar of many is that the data format specification for WCF Data Services (previously known as ADO.Net Data Services aka Astoria) has been proposed as an open standard for data exchange across ...