ADO.NET Entity Framework Providers for Oracle

Microsoft’s vision for .NET is a wide one. In addition to their desire for it to support all programming languages, either directly or through interoperability layers, they also want to bring together all communication frameworks and data storage engines. While WCF is making headway for standardizing communication APIs, their universal data access model Entity Framework is lagging behind.

A major problem up until now is that the ADO.NET Entity Framework did not come with out of the box support for the major non-Microsoft databases such as Oracle. This has opened a door for third-party vendors to fill in the gaps.

Once such vendor is Data Direct. For many users their most important claim to fame is being 100% managed code. Usually that isn’t really a big deal, but in this case it means that you can completely avoid the Oracle client.

Another vendor is Devart. Devart’s offering has been on the scene a bit longer than Data Direct and offers a comparable feature list. And not surprisingly, not needing the Oracle client is number 1 on their feature list as well.

Oracle itself is strangely quiet on the matter. While Oracle does offer ODP.NET, it is limited to the standard ADO.NET design patterns.

 

中文版：

Microsoft對.NET的定義很廣泛。除了支援所有的程式設計語言，不管是直接還是通過互操作，微軟還希望能整合所有的通訊架構和資料存放區引擎。當WCF已經在標準化通訊API的道路上取得領先時，微軟的通用資料訪問模型Entity Framework卻落在了後面。

迄今為止，ADO.NET Entity Framework的主要問題是不支援非微軟的主流資料庫，例如Oracle。這為第三方廠商提供了機會。

其中一個就是Data Direct。對於大多數使用者來說，他們提供的最重要的特性就是100%的Managed 程式碼實現。通常來說，這也並不是什麼大不了的事，但在這裡卻意味著你完全不需要Oracle用戶端。

另一家廠商是Devart。他們比Data Direct開始的更早，產品的特性也差不多。意料之中的是，不需要Oracle用戶端也是他們最重要的特性。

與此同時，Oracle自己卻顯得異常沉寂。雖然Oracle也提供了ODP.NET，但是它只支援標準的ADO.NET。