Alternative uses of Astoria
As you may know from my interactions on here and elsewhere I'm very curious about Astoria. I primarily work on BI projects and, even more specifically, I use SQL Server Integration Services (that's how i got my MVP thingummy) for data integration. For those that don't know, SSIS is used to combine and manipulate data from hereogenous data sources in the same place.
My current project makes heavy use of SSIS to provide data to data services. Currently those are WCF services. They are ASP.Net apps and they consume data from SSIS using an API that Microsoft provide.
The API isn't very good though and it is notoriously flaky. Essentially though we use an ADO.net wrapper to consume data out of a SSIS package. I got to thinking that if ADO.Net can talk to a SSIS package, why shouldn't a SSIS package be a source for an Astoria data service? After all, Pablo'srecent blog entry indicates that there is no reason why the data underlying a data service need come from a database per se.
I won't claim that exposing data sourced using SSIS via Astoria (or in fact any data service) is an easy thing to do - we've had TONNES of problems doing it, but I do think it is a compelling proposition.
I guess you're wondering if there's a question coming at the end of this. I realise that this perhaps isn't in Astoria territory, its probably more in Entity Data Model territory, but I'm interested in what you guys may think about this.
Essentially my train of thought is this. We are currently exposing data via data services and that data is sourced using SSIS packages. I am wondering whether there is any scope for including Astoria in this scenario.
Over to you guys. I'm interested in your thoughts here. Hopefully you don't mind my waffling.
Regards
-Jamie
