Oracle and ADO.NET- Microsoft: Deprecated; Oracle: quiet, DataDirect:Beta and DevArt:Released

Sunday, June 21 2009 - Data Access

While I was away Microsoft finally announced that they were deprecating their support for System.Data.OracleClient. Remember that “deprecated” means 10 years before it’s totally gone. It *will*  continue to be supported.

In fact here’s the official statement:

Microsoft will continue to provide hotfixes for critical issues in System.Data.OracleClient as per the standard support policy for .Net Framework 4.0. We will also continue to make critical bug fixes in future service packs for .Net Framework 4.0.

But the recommendation is that you probably don’t want to write new (.NET 4.0) apps with it.

I was hardly surprised. There had never been any mention of adding EF support which to me said they were not planning to keep up the product and what was the point of having it around if it did not support current features of ADO.NET. (Okay, that sentence deserved more punctuation than it got, but moving on…)

Oracle continues to promise their EF support, though there is still a wait and wonder policy on their end. Their .NET guy, Christian Shay (who spoke at DevConnections in the Data Access track last November) has not updated his blog since September :-(.  You can, however subscribe to the Oracle.NET newsletter here: Subscribe  I am subscribed but haven’t seen a newsletter yet.

Jonathan Bruce let me know that DataDirect just refreshed their Beta of Connect for ADO.NET Entity Framework provider for Oracle a few weeks ago, so they are definitely closing in on releasing their provider. This is the one that I’m banking on, personally. None of my existing clients are using Oracle as their back-end so it’s not a huge issue for me today.

DevArt released their Oracle client quite a while ago.

So there you have it, though I’m not quite sure what “it” is at this point.

Shout it
#1 Ido Flatow on 6.22.2009 at 3:50 AM

I've been working with DevArt's provider and EF and will take a look at DataDirect's provider.

I've also written some notes on migrating from Sql Server to Oracle, using DevArt's provider:

blogs.microsoft.co.il/.../migrating-entit

#2 Devart on 8.03.2009 at 10:27 AM

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users. One can choose the best Edition of our provider to fit his or her

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