LINQPad and Oracle

Question

Does LINQPad work with Oracle? Has anyone tried? What do you suggest?

Answer 1

As of beta version 4.35, LINQPad supports Oracle fully - you can now do "LINQ to Oracle" queries. I believe it uses the DevArt dotConnect libraries for managing this great feat. Further, in addition to native OCI support, it also supports a direct mode which does not require the Oracle OCI DLLs to be present.

To enable this feature you will need to simply add a new data connection in LINQPad, and when asked which driver to use - click the View more drivers... button. You can then install the IQ Driver and use it for querying Oracle, MySQL and SQLite databases.

Answer 2

Judging by their user voice item request for Oracle support, it appears unsupported at the moment.

A comment on the O'Reilly forums also suggests its not supported.

update As we understand it, there's now built-in Oracle support in the latest versions of LinqPad; the home page of LinqPad now lists support for Oracle.

update January 2013 The new LinqPad-to-Oracle support appears to still be available. Per the LinqPad FAQ:

Q. Why does LINQPad use LINQ to SQL under the covers, rather than Entity Framework?

A. LINQ to SQL is faster with large schemas and in most cases, emits better SQL. You can, however, use EF with EDMs that you define yourself. For querying SQLite, MySQL and Oracle (via the optional plug-in), LINQPad uses Matt Warren's IQueryable toolkit.

Answer 3

Linqpad now has support for lightspeed which supports oracle.