As Published In September/October 2003

Oracle Database 10g Brings Grid Benefits to .NET

By Kelli Wiseth

Oracle Database 10g is an enterprise-class, cluster-capable, grid-ready database that supports all new features equally across all platforms, including Windows server environments. In addition to the server side of the database itself, Oracle has worked over the years to facilitate application-development integration for Microsoft developers, especially those working in the .NET world. To this end, Oracle provided Oracle Data Provider for .NET (ODP.NET), which provides connectivity between the Oracle database and .NET applications. Many enhancements in the latest release of ODP.NET further extend that support by providing significant integration and performance improvements between .NET and Oracle Database 10g. This "grid-aware" version of ODP.NET means .NET developers can take advantage of Oracle Database 10g's grid capabilities.

For starters, says Alex Keh, principal product manager, Windows Technologies group in Oracle's Server Technologies division, ODP.NET now has enhanced support for Oracle XML DB. "That's important," he says, "because many .NET developers use XML heavily in their applications. Developers who are using .NET will be able to work with XML data much more easily, because of our integration with XML DB through the new APIs and a new XMLType datatype in ODP.NET."

ODP.NET now lets you manipulate XML data more easily within .NET, using the XMLType that's been native to the Oracle database since Oracle Database 9i. It also lets you access relational or object-relational data as XML data in an Oracle database instance from the Microsoft .NET environment—using Visual Studio .NET development tools, such as Visual Basic, Visual C++, or Visual C#, for example—and process the XML by using the facilities of the Microsoft .NET framework and saving any changes back into the Oracle database as XML data.

ODP.NET includes many other new capabilities, including support for nested cursors and PL/SQL associative arrays, allowing .NET developers to gain the benefits of working in Oracle's own programming constructs without losing the ability to use any part of .NET's functionality. For example, PL/SQL associative arrays (formerly known as PL/SQL Index-By Tables), comparable to hash tables in some other programming languages, are sets of key-value pairs that can represent data sets of arbitrary size; associative arrays can provide fast lookup of individual elements in an array without knowing their positions within the array or having to loop through all the array elements.

Another improvement in Oracle Database 10g available to ODP.NET developers is the new IEEE-compliant datatypes FLOAT and DOUBLE. Supported in ODP.NET, they take up less storage space, are faster than the other number datatypes available in Oracle, and facilitate more-direct handling of FLOAT and DOUBLE datatypes between host variables and stored data.

Finally, there are numerous other performance improvements, says Keh, "in terms of both performance and data retrieval—particularly in retrieving number data and LOBs. For example, in prior releases, developers had limited control over retrieving LOB data, "but with this release, there's a new property in ODP.NET, InitialLOBfetchSize, that allows you to optimize LOB retrieval to suit your needs," says Keh. For example, a European government agency's geographic information system (GIS) application that accesses tens of thousands of rows of LOB data gained a 17-fold improvement in its application speed, simply by replacing the ODP.NET driver with the newer version.