As a part of formulating our long term strategy for ADO.NET, we have had several discussions with number of our customers, internal and external partners, and MVPs to better align our development efforts to ensure we are delivering the right technologies according to our customers’ highest priority needs. One of the key intent of these discussions and the associated research was to understand the needs and requirements of customers who develop applications with Oracle using “System.Data.OracleClient” (OracleClient). OracleClient is the ADO.NET provider for Oracle developed by Microsoft and ships as a part of the .NET Framework.
We learned that a significantly large portion of customers use our partners’ ADO.NET providers for Oracle; with regularly updated support for Oracle releases and new features. In addition, many of the third party providers are able to consistently provide the same level of quality and support that customers have come to expect from Microsoft. This is strong testament of our partners support for our technologies and the strength of our partner ecosystem. It is our assessment that even if we made significant investments in ADO.Net OracleClient to bring it at parity with our partners based providers, customers would not have a compelling reason to switch to ADO.Net OracleClient.
The Decision
After carefully considering all the options and talking to our customers, partners, and MVPs it was decided to deprecate OracleClient as a part of our ADO.NET roadmap.
Recommendation and Guidance:
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
PingBack from http://aspmvc.co.cc/2009/06/15/systemdataoracleclient-update/
I have found two 3rd party providers:
-http://www.datadirect.com/products/net/net_for_oracle/index.ssp
-http://www.devart.com/dotconnect/oracle/
Are there others you can recommend?
The Devart provider supports EF and these guys even made their own implementation of LINQ to SQL - it's called LINQ to Oracle.
Sure it has bugs...But they fix them, really :-)
Himanshu Vasishth acaba de anunciar en el blog de ADO.NET que para .NET 4.0 el driver de Oracle para
Well this definitely sucks to hear. Almost any application I write for Oracle (a lot over the last few years) uses that client System.Data.OracleClient because it, unlike anything provided from Oracle directly, actually works and does it very well. Now I'm being told to go third-party?
OMG,
80% of our applications are using this provider and now you told me that i have to pay for a rubish 3rd party provider?
@Scott, @Banker - Third party doesn't have to mean rubbish... and it often means faster fixes and feature additions, as was the case with Entity Framework support.
@SteinarH - Depending on your needs, you might look into either --
http://uda.openlinksw.com/dotnet/mt/dotnet-oracle-mt/
-- or --
http://virtuoso.openlinksw.com/dataspace/dav/wiki/Main/VirtOracleEntityFrameworkUsage
Microsoft has made a huge announcement regarding the OracleClient library in ADO.NET. Himanshu Vasishth
Microsoft deprecating Oracle Client from ADO.NET 4
@scott: I think you'll find the latest ODP.net from Oracle works quite well.
Recent feature adds:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/windows/odpnet/newfeatures.html
VERY disappointing!
The System.Data.OracleClient has been so very stable.
Like @Scott, I think the OracleClient was way better than the System.Data.OracleClient.
It's like having to buy 3rd Party Controls for stupid features that should be included. I also do not experience faster upgrades from my 3rd Party Vendors.. Not at all..
This is bad, bad news!
What will be the impact of this to the Data Access Application Block ?
Disappointed as well. The ODP.Net drivers rarely work with Visual Studio tooling, and I think still lack any support for LINQ or EF. I think Oracle has been pretty clear at not supporting anything beyond basics in .Net - the merger with Sun only makes this announcement even worse.
@Shane, all,
I've tried using ODP.Net in the past and it's been a real pain because the libraries are version specific. Must have 10g ODP.Net for 10g install, 11g for 11g, etc.
I never had to worry about that with OracleClient.
I tried twice to switch to ODP (for the additional features) and gave up because of the versioning issues.
I would be interested in understanding who you spoke with to make this decision. We use the .Net library to access Oracle in all of our applications and it works very well and is stable. There are some more advanced features it doesn't support but these aren't enough to make me go to a third party. Not having support in .Net for the most popular database platform is a huge loss.
Going to third parties for stuff like this is a PITA. The quality is almost always worse for enterprise grade components like this and the cost is usualy prohibitive. I would rather see a good solid Oracle Provider from MSFT that supports limited features as opposed to every feature in Oracle exposed.