New sample provider demonstrates Oracle connectivity

As noted on Jaroslaw Kowalski's blog, we have released a new flavor of the ADO.NET Entity Framework sample provider.  You can access the Oracle flavor of the sample provider on the Code Gallery site here.

The new sample wraps System.Data.OracleClient instead of System.Data.SqlClient, demonstrating Oracle connectivity from the Entity Framework.  We chose to build this second flavor of the sample provider using OracleClient to help the provider writer community as well as to investigate issues that third party provider writers might encounter.  As noted in the readme for the OracleClient sample provider, we've addressed many of those issues within the Entity Framework in more recent builds.

The OracleClient flavor of the sample provider also demonstrates some key concepts we wanted to convey to other provider writers such as non-default type mappings, data type coercion in the reader, and canonical functions.  For more information on these topics, see Jarek's blog post.

As with the SqlClient flavor of the sample provider, we've chosen a license agreement that we believe will allow most provider writers to leverage the code in the sample to give them a running head start.

Enjoy!

David Sceppa

ADO.NET Program Manager