Versions and Releases

Microsoft has been a primary driving force behind OData’s development, but the protocol is now managed by the OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) OData Technical Committee, which includes representatives from various companies and organizations.

OData v1.0:

• Year of Release: 2007
• Founder: OData was initially developed by Microsoft, primarily by Pablo Castro, Mike Flasko, and Alex James.
• Basic protocol foundation.
• Limited features and capabilities compared to later versions.
• Primarily focused on CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations.

OData v2.0:

• Year of Release: 2012
• Founder: Microsoft continued to lead the development of OData, with contributions from various individuals and organizations in the OData community.
• Introduced batch requests for improved performance.
• Added support for system query options and JSON format.
• Improved support for navigation properties and entity relationships.
• Enhanced error handling and HTTP response codes.

OData v3.0:

• Year of Release: 2014
• Founder: Microsoft, with contributions from the OData community.
• Added support for actions, functions, and entity references.
• Introduced improvements in filtering, ordering, and pagination.
• Expanded capabilities for complex types and relationships.
• Enhanced support for metadata and annotations.

OData v4.0:

• Year of Release: 2014
• Founder: Microsoft played a significant role in the development of OData v4.0, along with contributions from the OData community.
• Major overhaul of the protocol.
• Introduced unified metadata for improved interoperability.
• Simplified querying with a focus on URL conventions.
• Added support for delta queries for efficient synchronization.
• Expanded support for complex types, navigation properties, and relationships.

OData v4.01:

• Year of Release: 2016 (approximate)
• Founder: Developed by the OData Technical Committee, which includes representatives from various organizations, with Microsoft being a major contributor.
• Incremental update with clarifications and bug fixes.
• Maintains compatibility with OData v4.0.

OData v4.02:

• Year of Release: 2017 (approximate)
• Founder: Developed by the OData Technical Committee, with contributions from various organizations and individuals.
• Another incremental update with further clarifications and bug fixes.

OData v4.1:

• Year of Release: 2017 (approximate)
• Founder: Developed by the OData Technical Committee, with contributions from various organizations and individuals.
• Introduced features like delta links for change tracking.
• Added support for referencing term vocabularies in annotations.
• Clarifications and improvements for clients and servers.

OData v4.5:

• Year of Release: 2018 (approximate)
• Founder: Developed by the OData Technical Committee, with contributions from various organizations and individuals.
• Enhanced JSON format with JSON Light for more compact payloads.
• Added support for asynchronous requests.
• Introduced features for server-driven paging.
• Incremental update with clarifications, bug fixes, and minor improvements.

OData v4.6:

• Year of Release: 2019 (approximate)
• Founder: Developed by the OData Technical Committee, with contributions from various organizations and individuals.

Each version of OData builds upon the previous one, adding new features, improving existing ones, and addressing feedback from the community. The evolution of OData reflects advancements in web API standards and best practices over time.