Microsoft Open Data Services (ODS) is a server-based API consisting of C functions and macros used for creating server applications. You can develop two types of server applications using ODS: applications called extended stored procedures that are added directly to Microsoft® SQL Server and accessed through procedure calls to SQL Server, and applications that are initialized as ODS servers and that support user connections and user queries.
Using ODS, you can provide extensions to SQL Server by integrating features from your network environment whenever certain events occur within SQL Server. For example, you can create extension functions that take specific actions based on updates to SQL Server tables, launch programs that are external to SQL Server, or exchange data with an application external to SQL Server. You can even make these functions transparent to SQL Server users.
You can generally make the ODS server application extension functions available as a set of extended stored procedures that you add to SQL Server itself.
You can also provide gateways to non–SQL Server database environments. ODS server applications can connect to relational databases to perform general-purpose data access, or to nonrelational data sources to perform application-specific tasks.
For ODS server applications that provide gateway functions, you might not need to involve a SQL Server database at all; your application can accept connections from multiple local area network (LAN) clients directly, access an external data source on their behalf, and then return responses to the clients.