My last post was about LINQ and EF Data Providers, which made me think of this.

I received an email recently asking if I knew of anyone writing an Entity Framework provider for Access.

I don’t happen to know of any.

However there’s a reason.

In the forums, there is a post from July where Danny Simmons explained the hurdles with a possible Access provider:

The OLE-DB ado.net provider has not been extended to support the entity framework, and we do not currently have plans to do so in our first release.  Further, this would be a fairly difficult effort because OLE-DB doesn’t provide enough information in general to translate CQTs (canonical query trees–the entity framework intermediate query representation) to a particular back-end query syntax.  So, while it would be possible to write an Access provider which would translate from CQTs to the particular query syntax that access uses, we don’t have an access-specific ado.net provider, and the general OLE-DB provider would not be able to do the job.

We have done some internal prototyping of how Access and the entity framework might work great together in the long-run, but those were just explorations, and we will not have direct support for Access in the first release of the entity framework.

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