If you are a .NET platform developer that targets an Oracle database platform then you must take note that the ADO.NET team has stated that while the OracleClient will ship as part of the .NET 4.0 Framework it will be marked as deprecated. What does this mean to you? Since .NET 4.0 has some time before it goes RTM you really should be considering what impact, if any, this may have on your existing applications as technology continues to advance. I am not stating that you should have immediate concerns but you should take a hard look at your application and see where your roadmap leads you. You can read below what the Program Manager has released or better yet visit the ADO.NET team blog, System.Data.OracleClient Update .
System.Data.OracleClient will be available in the upcoming 4.0 release of .NET Framework; however, it will be marked as deprecated. This will have no impact to existing applications and these applications will continue to work as expected. Developing new applications which use OracleClient will be supported; however, warnings will be raised if the applications are compiled against .Net 4.0. Once compiled, no warnings or errors will be generated while running these applications. We strongly recommend customers to use our partners’ ADO.NET Provider for Oracle instead of continuing to use Microsoft’s OracleClient for new application development.
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.
Thank you,
Himanshu Vasishth
Program Manager, ADO.NET OracleClient
To be honest I have only used the Microsoft provided OracleClient one time in my history and the project quickly made the move to ODP.NET. The reason is obvious and it simply came down to the need of interfacing with the underlying Oracle database using an assembly that provides much more robust support than that of Microsoft’s OracleClient. This is not to say you cannot use Microsoft’s OracleClient, you can! If you take the time to look at the differences between these two products you may find ODP.NET would be a better fit. In fact Oracle has what they coined as Oracle Data Access Components that you may want to read up on if you are not familiar with this product. Here is the current Beta Features for v11.1.0.7.10:
Oracle Data Provider for .NET Features
- Oracle Streams Advanced Queuing: Database messaging API for reliable, scalable, highly available .NET queuing
- Faster Data Retrieval: Faster performance when populating a DataSet or reading from an OracleDataReader
- Self-Tuning Applications: Automated run-time tuning of ODP.NET statement cache size to optimize memory usage and performance
- Promotable Transactions: Local transactions are automatically promoted to distributed transactions when a second connection joins a transaction
- Code Access Security: OraclePermission and OraclePermissionAttribute classes for securing access to Oracle resources
- High Availability Event Notification and Callback: Register callbacks and event handlers to respond to database Fast Application Notification (FAN) events
- Database Startup and Shutdown: Programmatically startup or shutdown an Oracle database from ODP.NET
Now, this is just my personal opinion but I think this decision could in fact be made with the recent acquisition of Sun on Oracle’s behalf (Oracle buys Sun; Now owns Java; Becomes a hardware player ). I have a gut feeling that over time we will begin to see Oracle and Microsoft fighting it out as .NET and Java are of course the two big boys on the block. What is your opinion?
Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio Features
- Oracle Performance Analyzer – Tune your application from Visual Studio
- Advanced Queuing (AQ) Designers – Create, modify and administer your Queues and Queue Tables
- Selection and operation on multiple Server Explorer nodes – For example, you can generate SQL scripts on any Oracle schema object or group of objects. You can compile any number of stored procedures or functions at once.
- Server Explorer Collection Node Filtering – Gives you fine grained control over which Oracle schema objects are displayed
- Server Explorer Node Paging – Improves performance when there are many database objects
- User and Role designers and Users and Roles Server Explorer nodes
- Grant/Revoke Privileges Wizard now supports System Privileges and Roles
- PL/SQL Compiler Settings Options page
- Table designer enhancements
- Rename schema objects in Server Explorer
- Oracle Trigger Designer enhancements
Related posts:
Steven enjoys all things technical, politics, fun and family. Basically life in general.
Comments are closed.