I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of the
Virtuoso ADO.NET 3.5 data provider for
Microsoft's .NET platform.
What is it?
A data access driver/provider that provides conceptual entity oriented access to RDBMS data managed by Virtuoso. Naturally,
it also uses Virtuoso's in-built virtual / federated database layer to provide access to
ODBC and JDBC accessible RDBMS engines such as:
Oracle (7.x to latest), SQL
Server (4.2 to latest), Sybase, IBM Informix (5.x to latest), IBM DB2,
Ingres (6.x to latest), Progress (7.x to
OpenEdge), MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebird, and others using our ODBC or JDBC
bridge drivers.
Benefits?
Technical:
It delivers an Entity-Attribute-Value + Classes &
Relationships model over disparate data sources that are
materialized as .NET Entity Framework Objects, which are then
consumable via ADO.NET Data Object Services, LINQ for Entities, and
other ADO.NET data consumers.
The provider is fully integrated into Visual Studio 2008 and
delivers the same "ease of use" offered by Microsoft's own SQL
Server provider, but across Virtuoso, Oracle, Sybase, DB2,
Informix, Ingres, Progress (OpenEdge), MySQL, PostgreSQL,
Firebird, and others. The same benefits also apply uniformly to
Entity Frameworks compatibility.
Bearing in mind that Virtuoso is a multi-model (hybrid) data
manager, this also implies that you can use .NET Entity Frameworks
against all data managed by Virtuoso. Remember, Virtuoso's SQL
channel is a conduit to Virtuoso's core; thus, RDF (courtesy of
SPASQL as already implemented re. Jena/Sesame/Redland providers), XML, and other data
forms stored in Virtuoso also become accessible via .NET's Entity
Frameworks.
Strategic:
You can choose which entity oriented data access model works
best for you: RDF Linked Data & SPARQL or .NET Entity Frameworks &
Entity SQL. Either way, Virtuoso delivers
a commercial grade, high-performance, secure, and scalable
solution.
How do I use it?
Simply follow one of guides below:
Note: When working with external or 3rd party databases,
simply use the Virtuoso Conductor to link the external data source
into Virtuoso. Once linked, the remote tables will simply be
treated as though they are native Virtuoso tables leaving the
virtual database engine to handle the rest.
This is similar to the role the Microsoft JET engine played in the
early days of ODBC, so if you've ever linked an ODBC data source
into Microsoft Access, you are ready to do the same using
Virtuoso.
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