The OData Provider Model
WCF Data Services supports two data sources out of the box: an EF data source and a CLR data source.
This lets you expose an OData service from any database that supports EF as well as arbitrary CLR objects.
There are many reasons to need more than this, particularly if your data is not relational or you can’t afford to have CLR types floating around all over the place.
A canoncial example of this scenario is the SharePoint data model.
In order to support SharePoint, we adedd a dynamic data source provider model that we call IDSP internally.
This provider model consists of a number of interfaces that you can use to expose any data source as an OData service.
One of the PMs on the WCF Data Services team, AlexJ, is blogging about this at now.
http://blogs.msdn.com/alexj/archive/2010/01/04/creating-a-data-service-provider-part-1-intro.aspx
Worth checking out…
You might also look at the NHibernate.LINQ provider that I created for NHibernate.
Shawn Wildermuth
5 Jan 10 at 07:13