I’m in the process of cleaning up an Oracle database application. In this application, performance and ease of access are paramount concerns. It has to get out of your way and let you get to the data in a free and uninhibited way. While doing that, it has to be very fast. When it can’t be fast, it has to be multi-threaded so that it doesn’t freeze up the system.
All of that out of the way, here’s what I’ve learned. Microsoft has deprecated the System.Data.OracleClient namespace. It’ll be around in .NET 4.0, but it’ll be marked with ObsoleteAttribute. I’ve currently swapped it out for ODP.NET from Oracle (which turned out to be surprisingly painless), but in reviewing other comments, I realized that I was still failing to meet a few design goals:
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I might not be using the fastest provider out there.
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I still can’t seem to provide access to the SYSOPER account. I haven’t quite worked out why, yet. That could be a coding issue, but I’m stumped.
So here’s my question for you guys.
What are the 3rd party alternatives to System.Data.OracleClient that you’ve used, and what are their pros and cons?
I used ODP.NET and I’m satisfied with it.
There were some cons, which are gone with the last version of oracle instant client supporting odp.net.