Do a book search on Amazon for most .Net topics and you will usually be rewarded with a wealth of doorstops to choose from. Enter the search term “ODP.Net” though and you get erm… one result. This I find a little surprising, especially as, according to Oracle at least, ODP.Net (Oracle’s Data Provider for .Net) offers [probably] the best performance and richness for accessing Oracle back-ends. I've used ODP.Net myself on some fairly large scale developments and find the provider reliable, functionally more rich than Microsoft's offering (see a comparison article on MSDN, albeit now a little dated) and has excellent performance.
Anyhow, the aforementioned Amazon "only resulting" book (entitled ODP.NET Developer's Guide) recently landed on my doormat from the publisher PackT who contacted me to take a peruse at it. I've not had chance to look at it in detail yet but here's a chapter summary in case you are looking for such a volume...
The Chapters
Summary of the content:
Chapter 1: introduces the concept of Oracle Database Extensions for .NET and provides information about Oracle Developer tools for Visual Studio.
Chapter 2: introduces the Provider Independent Model in ADO.NET 2.0 and how it relates to Oracle.
Chapter 3: shows you several methods to retrieve data from an Oracle database. You will work with the core ODP.NET classes like OracleCommand, OracleDataReader, OracleDataAdapter etc.
Chapter 4: is all about CRUD operations but also includes caching, array binding, offline data, transactions and error handling
Chapter 5: PL/SQL stored procedures and executing routines in PL/SQL packages. Array parameters and ref cursors are also covered.
Chapter 6: dedicated to dealing with Large objects in Oracle. This chapter illustrates concepts, configurations, and programming for BFILE, BLOB, and CLOB (or NCLOB) in conjunction with ODP.NET.
Chapter 7: Oracle XML DB. It provides information about generating XML from existing rows in tables, manipulating rows in a table using XML, and working with native XML in the Oracle database.
Chapter 8: a bit of a mix this one. Covers database change notifications, Asynchronous Application development, Web Application development, Web Reporting (including grouping, sub-totals, charts etc.), Object-Oriented Development with ODP.NET and ASP.NET, XML Web Services development using ODP.NET and Smart Device Application development (for clients like the Pocket PC etc.).
Chapter 9: introduces you to Oracle Developer Tools (ODT) for Visual Studio 2005.
All .Net code examples are in VB.Net.
2 comments:
Did you ever get around to reviewing this? I'm interested in the book but can't find any legitimate reviews. Thanks.
Hi Jeff R
No I did not do a formal review. If you are an experienced ODP.Net developer, the book offers very little to be honest. If you are new to the provider though, then the book is worth a peruse. DC
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