Meta Data Services was an object-oriented repository technology that could be integrated with enterprise information systems or with applications that process metadata.
Meta Data Services was originally named the Microsoft Repository and was delivered as part of Visual Basic 5 in 1997.
In 1998, Microsoft joined the Meta Data Coalition and transferred management of the underlying Open Information Model (OIM) of the Repository to the standards body.
[3] A number of Microsoft technologies used Meta Data Services as a native store for object definitions or as a platform for deploying metadata.
One of the ways in which Microsoft SQL Server 2000 used Meta Data Services was to store versioned DTS Packages.