The combination works like a charm, except that I would say the problems had
been that .NET could not leverage all the power of Oracle in the past (as
opposed to Oracle not being able to leverage .NET).  I would stick to using
the MS drivers for Oracle, rather than Oracle's own.  In the past Oracle's
drivers had been faster, while being a little more troublesome to use. While
this may very well have changed in the latest Oracle drivers, so too has MS
begun implementing some of the more useful Oracle functionality into the MS
drivers for Oracle. (I say "drivers" but only because I have been
programming for a long time.  The right .NET term is probably "data access
assemblies") That's really about it...

I have several .NET applications dealing with Oracle, and everything works
great.

¤ I am currently architecting .NET Application for an Enterpise Level
¤ client.
¤
¤ The customer has a natural Oracle bias. I think that Oracle is a great
¤ DBMS too. Probably still better thatn SQL Server.
¤
¤ Having said that I have a bias against hetrogenoeuous stacks (ie Oracle
¤ and .Net,  SQL Server and Java).
¤
¤ My feeling is that their would be significant complexities added by
¤ chosing Oracle/.Net vs SQLServer/.NET. I feel that these complexitoes
¤ would arise for the following reasons
¤      -Disparate Dev/Management Tools difficult to co-ordinate
¤      -Debugging and Isolating problems
¤      -No native capability to leverage .NET Framework in Oracle
¤      -Finding resources with Hybrid knowledge
¤      -Multi-Vendor Support for cross-cutting issues
¤      -Co-ordinating future Roadmaps of multiple vendors
¤
¤ Anyways, that is my recognized bias.
¤
¤ I am wanting experience and opinions on the drawbacks and benefits of
¤ selecting a hetrogeneous Oracle/.Net stack.

The biggest one for us is the fact the two don't integrate well, being from different vendors who
don't particularly get along when it comes to support of the database platform. Sometimes trying to
get help can result in finger pointing between the vendors.

I don't particularly care for PL/SQL Developer, usability and documentation is poor, but it's more
capable than the Oracle Tools add-in for Visual Studio, albeit less intuitive.

Then there's the issues with drivers/providers. Microsoft's are typically more stable but don't
support all Oracle features. Of course, if you want to use Oracle's .NET provider then you have to
be using the version 9i or higher client.

We've also encountered issues (unicode) when using CLOB and rather bizarre methods for inserting
into BLOB columns in Oracle.

Paul
~~~~
Microsoft MVP (Visual Basic)