In conversations with many .NET developers and architects, I consistently hear a preference to build their initial implementations with SQL Server. In many cases, it’s perfectly logical to do this. If you want to spin your application quickly, it offers the least path of resistance to get things up & running. Once developers turn their application loose in their enterprise, there’s soon a need to expose their application to a much greater database diversity and it is a major pain to get your .NET applications to operate consistently or functional agreeably in such a diverse environment.
With vanilla ADO.NET, and considering recent announcements, there a number of strategies you can follow, you could even use the Enterprise Library’s, Data Access Application Blocks as way to provide a single ‘database’ context for your business application focused developers.
EF gives you a huge leg up to solving this problem, as it offers a near ODBC-like database agnostic data access model regardless of whether you are programming at the LINQ, EntitySQL or ObjectContext interfaces. Coupled with EDM you have a consistent model that can, in theory offer a universal data access model for any number data sources, assuming the availability of EF providers.
So with that in mind, we are embarking on a series of postings we will cover a range of topics where we’ll share our experiences in how we’ve been successful in making all our supported versions of Oracle work effectively with EF and Connect for ADO.NET.
Check back often for what we hope will become an indispensible guide!