Connecting to an Oracle Database

Question

Hi I need to connect to an Oracle Database from my application developed in .NET. This is a Windows Forms application. I was evaluating several data providers for this and the two most popular ones seem to be Oracle's ODP.NET and Microsoft's OracleClient. But both need Oracle Client Software installed on Client's machine which is inconvenient for us. I wanted to know if it is a common practice to install Oracle Client on every client machine. Can I use some other data providers to do the same without having to go through this installation? Thanks in advance. Amit.

alejandro.rivera · Answer

I'm not sure if it's common practice to install the Oracle Client on every machine. You will have to use either OLE DB .NET or ODBC.NET. You will take a performance hit because of the added layer using either of these two options. Depending on how many clients you're talking about I think for performance reasons you may want to install the Oracle Client.