News
Microsoft Creates .NET Provider for Oracle
- By Scott Bekker
- July 23, 2002
Microsoft on Tuesday made one of its occasional noises about integration with a competitor when it trumpeted a new tool for wiring Oracle databases to applications developed in the .NET Framework.
The new tool is called the .NET Framework Data Provider for Oracle and it is supposed to give developers an easier and higher-performance method for attaching Oracle databases to the .NET applications they write.
Microsoft already provided generic access to Oracle and other databases through an OLE DB provider. The new Oracle-specific provider uses native Oracle interfaces and, according to Microsoft, offers performance improvements of up to 200 percent in some cases over using the OLE DB provider with an Oracle database.
Microsoft's SQL Server database competes directly with Oracle in the database market. Microsoft often does integration work to improve performance and interoperability between its products and Unix, Oracle and other competitive products. The company frequently makes little noise about such work, preferring instead to focus its marketing and advertising power on promoting pure Microsoft solutions that bring more revenue back to Redmond.
The Oracle provider is available for download here.
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.