A.4 The Oracle .NET Provider

There are currently two native Oracle providers. Microsoft provides a native Oracle provider that uses the Oracle Call Interface (OCI), provides structures that represent basic Oracle data types, and is optimized for Oracle 8i. This provider can be downloaded from http://msdn.microsoft.com (search for Oracle .NET) but is included with the .NET Framework 1.1 (see Table A-7). It doesn't support Oracle 7.3. To use these types, add a reference to the System.Data.OracleClient.dll assembly in your Visual Studio .NET project, or use the following csc.exe command line:

csc /r:System.Data.OracleClient.dll codeFile.cs

Table A-7. Oracle .NET provider classes

Interface	Implementing class
IDbConnection	OracleConnection
IDbCommand	OracleCommand
IDataParameter, IDbDataParameter	OracleParameter
IDataReader, IDataRecord	OracleDataReader
IDataAdapter, IDbDataAdapter	OracleDataAdapter
IDbTransaction	OracleTransaction