Oracle Provider Gets EF Support

Posted by Roopesh Shenoy on Jan 02, 2012

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Oracle has recently released Oracle Data Access Components (ODAC) 11.2 Rel 4 with support for Entity Framework 4.1 and 4.2. This will allow .NET developers working with Oracle database to work with a popular ORM and use LINQ to Entities for data access operations instead of hand-coding the SQL statements. 

Although the new provider supports EF, it does not support some of the latest features like Code First and DbContext which were introduced in EF 4.1. On the other hand, apart from EF support, there are several other features introduced in the latest release; for example you can now write WCF Data Services for data in an Oracle Database. You can learn more about all the features supported in ODAC in the official documentation. 

The provider has been in beta for a while. There is an article on how to work with Oracle and EF using the Visual Studio Toolset as well as a simple tutorial to get developers started. 

Entity Framework is designed with a provider model so that it works with third party data providers. There is also a sample provider that shows how to do this for non-SQL Server databases. Oracle has now implemented this for Oracle database. 

Oracle is not the only non-SQL Server database to have a provider with EF support – the ADO.NET Providers page lists all the Third Party Providers for various databases that support Entity Framework. 

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