On Lee Byron’s GraphQL team at Facebook where Nick Schrock and the joung Daniel Schafer, and it’s safe to assume that either one or both of them had knowledge about what was going on at Microsoft these days.
In 2009, Microsoft officially released oData 1.0 as part of their ADO.NET Data Services. Development startet two years earlier. It was developed as part of the company’s efforts to create a more uniform approach to building RESTful APIs, particularly for enterprise applications that handle large amounts of structured data.
Only one year later, SAP announced NetWeaver Gateway as a means to simplify the integration of SAP business data with non-SAP applications, devices, and user interfaces. OData was chosen as the core protocol for this platform, making it easier for developers to access SAP data using standard RESTful web services.
The reason why oData was created:
Uniform Data Access: Microsoft wanted a protocol that could enable consistent and uniform access to different data sources (databases, cloud services, etc.) in a standardized way.
Extend REST with Querying Power: Unlike basic REST APIs, OData was designed to support more complex operations like filtering, sorting, and pagination through URL parameters (e.g., $filter, $select, $orderby, $top).
Metadata Exposure: OData allows clients to understand the data model by exposing metadata, making it easier for developers to interact with complex datasets without needing deep knowledge of the backend structure.
Interoperability: By making it an open standard and pushing for its adoption across different platforms, OData ensured interoperability between systems, which is crucial for enterprise applications.
And you can add the benefits of GraphQL on top of it.
OData has evolved over several versions since its inception, each version introducing new features, improvements, and greater flexibility. The current version OData 4.02. SAP is currently finishing their work on fully supporting OData 4.0.
Beside Microsoft and SAP other blue chips are using OData, like IBM, Salesforce, Oracle, Autodesk, and others.