Hello,

We are currently considering different ORM solutions for our new 3-tier application, and in this respect DO.NET looks quite attractive, but...

We used to have a lot more pleasant experience with DevArt's dotConnect data access library for Oracle than with standard ODP.NET. Please correct us if we err, but ODP.NET seems to be the only option available for DO.NET. Therefore our first intention was to just implement our own provider for Oracle which simply uses dotConnect under the hood.

Independent from this matter we had another idea to "deploy" DO.NET on both ends of our client-server solution. DO.NET hosted on the application server will talk to the database as normally, and expose certain services over WCF. DO.NET on the client-side won't have a direct access to the database, but instead will route the queries to the WCF services on our middle-tier. This again sounds like yet another (maybe a bit non-standard) data provider.

Apparently the official documentation doesn't really cover the topic of custom data providers. What is even more strange, that it doesn't contain a complete reference for DO.NET classes and functions which one would of course need to understand in order to implement such ideas.

Therefore three questions:

1. What would be your recommendation for the dotConnect provider? Anything to develop or is it supported out-of-the-box, because DetArt implements standard .NET interfaces for data access?
2. Your opinion on DO.NET-to-DO.NET data provider? Does it sound realistic?
3. Did we overlook something in the documentation? Where can we find the class reference? Or does Xtensive reserve its exclusive right for writing data providers and other custom extensions?

Thanks, Alexander Zabluda