It seems that MS have got bored with OLEDB and are now wanting us all to learn .net and to access our data with .net data providers. This is fair enough, few people have managed to write OLEDB Providers that work reliably because it's so complex (MS admit this in at least one MSDN article).
However, there's a problem. Those of use who rely on linked servers for a living are stuck with trying to make OLEDB Providers work. Some do, some don't. MS have dropped most of the commonly used OLEDB Providers from MDAC implying that whilst you can still download them, there will be no further development. The biggest problems for my employer being:
The OLEDB Provider for ODBC has bugs in it that will probably never be fixed now.
The OLEDB Provider for Oracle was written for Oracle 7 and was patched for Oracle 8, but of course success with Oracle 9 depends on not using data types introduced by Oracle in the last 4 years. (The Oracle OLE provider for Oracle and the Data-Direct Technologies provider for Oracle don't work with Linked Servers either).
So, what are we to do? I'm hoping that SQL Server will be changed so that linked servers support .net data providers. However, there's no news of this (if I'm wrong about this *PLEASE TELL ME*) and frankly I think that if this is the route MS are going to take it should have been released at the same time as the rest of .net.
Can anyone shed any light on this?
However, there's a problem. Those of use who rely on linked servers for a living are stuck with trying to make OLEDB Providers work. Some do, some don't. MS have dropped most of the commonly used OLEDB Providers from MDAC implying that whilst you can still download them, there will be no further development. The biggest problems for my employer being:
The OLEDB Provider for ODBC has bugs in it that will probably never be fixed now.
The OLEDB Provider for Oracle was written for Oracle 7 and was patched for Oracle 8, but of course success with Oracle 9 depends on not using data types introduced by Oracle in the last 4 years. (The Oracle OLE provider for Oracle and the Data-Direct Technologies provider for Oracle don't work with Linked Servers either).
So, what are we to do? I'm hoping that SQL Server will be changed so that linked servers support .net data providers. However, there's no news of this (if I'm wrong about this *PLEASE TELL ME*) and frankly I think that if this is the route MS are going to take it should have been released at the same time as the rest of .net.
Can anyone shed any light on this?