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 8 i . 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