December 11, 2019
With Skyvia you do not need to build web API manually — no need in developing a service, caring about security, hosting and domain, obtaining respective certificates, deploying, administering or maintaining. Skyvia Connect is a universal cloud-based solution that takes care of all this. It needs no coding, no technical skills.
Skyvia Connect allows you to easily expose your SQL Server data via OData service — RESTful API for quick, real-time data access and manipulation. OData is a widely accepted open standard built on HTTP, ATOM/XML and JSON, intended for data access over the Internet with no firewall configuration. You can use it to expose any kind of data in a fast and convenient way – both from cloud and on-premise servers. To connect to on-premise servers, use our new Agent application developed by Skyvia team exactly for these needs.
Agent is a secure tunnel application developed to connect your Skyvia account to local, on-premise databases with ease and comfort and to establish secure communication bypassing firewall.
Try its functions by installing Agent application to your PC and creating a SQL Server connection you want to work with. Follow our easy step-by-step tutorial on how to do it in Skyvia.
To create an agent, perform the following steps:
Click +NEW in the top menu and select Agent from the list on the left.
When the Agent editor page opens, click Download.exe to download an Agent application
When you do it, the Skyvia Agent window pops up. Click the INSTALL button. By default, agent will be installed to C:\Program Files (x86)\Skyvia Agent.
If you have done everything correctly, on the Agent editor page you will see Connected sign and green light next to it.
To create a connection, perform the following steps:
Select Connection from the list on the left. The Select Connector page will open.
When the Connection editor page opens, select Agent under Connection Mode and fill in all the required parameters.
To create an SQL server OData endpoint, perform the following steps:
Click +NEW in the top menu and click on Endpoint under Connect.
On the page that opens, select the SQL Server connection from the created ones and you are transferred to the Endpoint editor page.
On the Endpoint editor page, drag-n-drop tables you need and manage connections between them.
In Skyvia, you can optionally allow only authenticated users to access endpoint data and optionally limit IP addresses, from which the data of the endpoint can be accessed. Click Users on the toolbar and add a user to enable authentiсation for your endpoint. The same you can do with IPs.
When you have already created the endpoint, you can copy its URL from the Overview tab and use it for different purposes as well as in your OData consumer applications. You may also test the endpoint URL in the browser.
Having made a request in the browser, you will receive a response containing entity sets. In our example, we have received a response with 3 entity sets in JSON format — AddressTypes, BusinessEntityAddresses and Addresses.
To receive all addresses with such parameters as AddressID, AddressLine, City, StateProvinceID, etc., we add the corresponding name of the entity set, Addresses, in the URL bar and check the displayed data.
You may use the endpoint URL in any other OData consumer applications, such as Excel or Salesforce Connect, etc. You determine it yourself based on your business needs and actual demand.
We welcome you to try OData REST API for SQL Server and enjoy full functionality of our platform by creating SQL Server OData connectors and exposing SQL server databases as OData endpoints and many more. Give us your feedback and share your thougts!
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