Welcome to the Project Astoria Team Blog!  The Astoria team (part of the “Data Programmability” (DP) team within the SQL Server organization at Microsoft) is responsible for analyzing how current and next generation internet enabled applications use data on the web and to build solutions to facilitate such usage patterns.  For those that have followed the Project Codename “Astoria” since its prototype stages, the project has moved out of the incubation phase and will become part of the suite of data access technologies created by the DP team.  We look forward to sharing our thoughts and listening to your feedback via this blog as we progress through the project.   

Project Astoria Overview

The goal of the Astoria project is to enable applications to expose data as a data service that can be consumed by web clients within corporate networks and across the internet. Such data services are reachable over regular HTTP requests using standard HTTP verbs such as GET, POST, PUT and DELETE to represent the operations against the service.   The payload format for the data exchanged with the service can be controlled by the client and all options are simple, open formats such as plan XML and JSON. The use of web-friendly technologies make it ideal as a data back-end for AJAX-style applications, Rich Interactive Applications and other applications that need to operate against data that is across the web. 

                Further reading: Astoria Overview, Using Astoria             

What is available now?

During the incubation phase of Project Astoria the team created an experimental Community Tech Preview (CTP) release to share our early thoughts of what we envision the Astoria product to look like.  The CTP release has two components:

·         we shipped bits you can download, install and run on your own systems

·         we also made available an experimental online service that we hope will help us better understand the requirements and usage patterns of data services on the web

Additional Resources

Project Codename “Astoria” website: http://astoria.mslivelabs.com

Mix conference presentation announcing experimental CTP release of Astoria: http://sessions.visitmix.com/default.asp?event=1011&session=2011,2012&pid=XD006&disc=&id=1573&year=2007&search=XD006

Mike Flasko

Program Manager