InfoQ

InfoQ

News

My Bookmarks

Login or Register to enable bookmarks for unlimited time.

The content has been bookmarked!

There was an error bookmarking this content! Please retry.

Microsoft OracleClient Deprecated

Posted by Al Tenhundfeld on Jun 22, 2009

Sections
Architecture & Design,
Development,
Operations & Infrastructure
Topics
.NET ,
Data Access ,
.NET Framework
Tags
ADO.NET ,
.NET Framework 4.0 ,
Oracle

Microsoft announced System.Data.OracleClient will be deprecated after .NET 4.0. Classes in the namespace will be marked obsolete in .NET 4.0 and removed from future releases. OracleClient is the ADO.NET provider for Oracle developed by Microsoft and shipped as part of the .NET Framework Class Library.

This decision has sparked controversy among the community of .NET developers working with Oracle. While many enterprise .NET applications use a 3rd party Oracle provider, System.Data.OracleClient is often used in small applications and typically has better integration with other Microsoft tools.

Microsoft insists this decision was made after much deliberation and research:

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.

Part of the reasoning for this decision is the increasingly availability and improvements of 3rd party ADO.NET data providers for Oracle. There have been significant performance improvements and enhanced multi-version compatibility among the popular Oracle providers:

Despite the community backlash, Microsoft has shown no signs of reversing the decision, and none should be expected. Microsoft's official line is that "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." Therefore, it's not worth the investment to bring OracleClient up to parity with the third party providers, and this frees MS resources to focus on ADO.NET.

Some are calling this move an underhanded strike to raise the bar for .NET development against Oracle, but many are viewing this decision with a guarded optimism that Microsoft might be rethinking its not-invented-here bias. For example, it is a common complaint among the ALT.NET crowd that Microsoft reinvents the wheel for no reason, creating their own versions of products when good alternatives already exist. See MSTest vs. NUnit or Entity Framework vs. NHibernate. In the context of recent decisions to officially support jQuery and provide the source code for ASP.NET MVC, this decision could be interpreted as Microsoft further admitting that it doesn't need to control the entire stack; they can rely on their partners and the community to provide some pieces.

Also, the Connected Show Podcast has an episode discussing this move and examining why it's not a disaster.

 

Good decision by Hong Hong Posted
wishful thinking by Stefan Wenig Posted
Re: wishful thinking by Al Tenhundfeld Posted
Re: wishful thinking by Stefan Wenig Posted
  1. Back to top

    Good decision

    by Hong Hong

    I support that.

  2. Back to top

    wishful thinking

    by Stefan Wenig

    It's a long way from Microsoft realizing that Oracle is not part of their stack to acknowledging that they don't need to control the entire stack at all. ;-)

  3. Back to top

    Re: wishful thinking

    by Al Tenhundfeld

    I agree it's optimistic, probably overly optimistic, but there have been some encouraging signs that Microsoft, especially Scott Guthrie's group, are listening to their developer community's pleas for more openness.

    I'm not trying to say MS is doing anything just to be nice. I think they're intelligently responding to the fact that there are many options for programmers nowadays, and if they maintain their closed, iron-fisted approach, they will lose some of their most vocal developer evangelists to languages/environments like Ruby, Scala, etc.

    Is deprecating OracleClient part of this shift towards openness? Maybe that's a stretch; I think the ADO.NET team just decided their resources would be better spent elsewhere. But I don't think deprecating OracleClient is part of some evil conspiracy to marginalize Oracle; this move will probably be beneficial for .NET Oracle development in the long run.

    And I wouldn't be shocked if, in the next few years, Microsoft released the source code for OracleClient under the MS-PL.

  4. Back to top

    Re: wishful thinking

    by Stefan Wenig

    I believe you're right about the encouraging signs and ScottGu and friends. Just saying that OracleClient is probably not one of those signs. That was just a move to establish .NET in Oracle environments. No need for that any more, Oracle provides their own provider, and they're probably pouring more resources into it anyway.

Educational Content

10 tips on how to prevent business value risk

One category of risk that project teams need to ensure they address is business value failure – delivering a product that fails to provide value for the business investor.

Interview: Software Systems Architecture: Working With Stakeholders Using Viewpoints and Perspectives

InfoQ spoke to the authors of Software Systems Architecture on a couple of new topics, the System Context viewpoint and Agile, which have been added to the second edition.

Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder

Alex Papadimoulis discusses ugly code, where it comes from, how to avoid it, and how to get rid of it.

Architecting Visa for Massive Scale and Continuous Innovation

John Davies examines Visa’s architecture and shows how enterprises have architected complex integrations incorporating Hadoop, memcached, Ruby on Rails, and others to deliver innovative solutions.

Max Protect: Scalability and Caching at ESPN.com

Sean Comerford unveils ESPN.com’s architecture, what components are used and why, and the current changes the website goes through.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Enterprise Agile Adoption

Are there repeated patterns of failure on Enterprise Agile Enablement efforts? Sanjiv and Arlen discuss Seven Deadly Sins to avoid when adopting Agile in an enterprise.

Questions for an Enterprise Architect

Erik Dörnenburg answers: What is Enterprise and Evolutionary Architecture?, discussing 4 issues: Turning strategy into execution, Ensuring conformance, Where do the architects sit? Buying or building?

Wrap Your SQL Head Around Riak MapReduce

Sean Cribbs explains what Map-Reduce and Riak are, why and how to use Map-Reduce with Riak, and how to convert SQL queries into their Map-Reduce equivalents.