Tools and Applications

Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Meta Data Services is a technology designed to be used by tools and applications. A tool is a software program intended to help application developers design, implement, deploy, and maintain applications. An application is a program designed to assist in the performance of a specific task, such as word processing, accounting, or inventory management.

In Meta Data Services architecture, tools and applications are programs that you build or provide. In the architecture, tools and applications exist outside of the core engine and storage components, connecting to these core components through open standards.

Tools and applications range from modeling software that you use to build information models at design time to data warehousing or application development tools that use or transform meta data at run time. The type of tools and applications that can be used with Meta Data Services is open-ended.

The following list summarizes some of the ways in which Microsoft, independent software vendors (ISVs), and software developers have integrated Meta Data Services with tools and product offerings. This list shows a few examples of how the Microsoft repository technology is being applied.

SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2000 Analysis Services, English Query, and Microsoft Visual Studio® use Meta Data Services to store meta data, to interchange meta data with other tools, and to add versioning capability to tools that support meta data creation.
ISV providers use Meta Data Services in commercial product offerings to store value-added, predefined information models that can be used by ISV customers.
Software developers have incorporated Meta Data Services into application development environments to deploy application designs across a variety of development tools.

For more information about how the technology is deployed by third-party vendors, see the SQL Server page at the Microsoft Web site.

Tools and Applications

See Also