Microsoft has announced through a blog that the ADO.NET 4 spec will mark the Oracle client as deprecated with plans for removal. They are also recommending that users go to a third party Oracle provider.
Visual Studio Magazine has picked up the story now as well.
Stop Helping the Competition?
Wow, this will mark the first time an ADO.NET provider has been removed from the .Net framework. Is this a case of Microsoft trimming the fat, or pushing Oracle? I always thought it a bit of a free ride that Microsoft was helping Oracle by building their provider for them, but no one else got such special treatment.
And equally as strange to me was that Oracle was built in, when no other third party could get their provider included. I guess they are going to make that equal across the board, no one else gets included.
Another reason to stay managed code!
This is yet another reason to stay with fully managed code as well. You won’t have provider install issues that these guys are going to have going forward. Oracle client users are now going to have to install a provider that probably will not be 100% managed code. That is going to mean two or more distributions (32 / 64 bit), and probably issues with medium trust support.
VistaDB of course is 100% managed code and has no such issues. Since we can deploy a single assembly to both 32 and 64 bit machines we get around the entire install issue. And since we are 100% managed code with no DllImports you never have a trust issue with the admin settings on the box.
Oracle = Large?
This is going to affect a lot of Oracle developers eventually. But since most Oracle shops are pretty large companies maybe it is not such a big deal anyway. Larger companies take a long time to migrate from one platform to the next. Let’s fact it, .Net 4 might be 10 years away for them anyway. Some of them just made the move to .Net 2.
Any smaller shops using Oracle? I honestly don’t know any, but we walk mostly in SQL Server circles.
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