At work, one of our primary databases is running on MS SQL Server. I think it's 2008.
I'm currently hitting it via UnixODBC and FreeTDS from a Linux host. Unfortunately, the UnixODBC/FreeTDS are not supported by our admins, so it falls on me. For a long-term strategy I want to move off ODBC and switch to HTTP, using either SOAP or REST calls. The installation is a lot easier with HTTP and most languages understand it, at least Perl, Python and Ruby, which I develop in.
We've got a decent amount of SOAP calls set up on the database for some Java processes, so we can probably switch to that pretty easily. We were discussing REST also, which I like because it's lighter-weight. Our DBAs don't have any REST interfaces set up, so I was wondering if there is a plugin or tool for SQL Server that can do simple REST mappings of the tables to get us jump-started. I've considered writing something in Ruby's Sinatra but that'd be one more thing on my plate.
I searched for "SQL Server + rest" but it's pretty obvious that the Googles will do the wrong thing with the word "REST" and, as a consequence, didn't find anything worth while. So, if you have experience with something providing REST and felt it was a good tool then chime in.
Best Answer
If you're on SQL Server 2008 R2, I'd recommend taking a look at the Open Data Protocol (also known as OData). Microsoft has some FAQs on it as well, and there is a Java client library available.
Also take a look at sqlREST, which exposes relational databases using web services and works with most databases that have a JDBC driver.