What is an Oracle Client?

Question

I'm from MySQL background and am new to Oracle. I want to know

• What is meant by Oracle Client?
• What is its use?
• What is its equivalent in MySQL ?

Thanks

Answer 1

What is meant by Oracle Client?

and

What is its use?

In this context, a client is a class library (DLL) that allows you to connect remotely to the underlying database of an application. A client, always within the same context, can also be called a .NET Data Provider.

You may have multiple data providers based on the underlying database engine with which you're working.

There was System.Data.OracleClient (deprecated), provided by Microsoft.

There is Oracle.Data.Client, which is actually the best ever built Oracle Client, or Oracle .NET Data Provider. You may also download the latest Oracle 11g Data Provider for .NET.

So, when accessing the Oracle underlying database, make sure your work with this provider, proper for your version of Oracle, and start doing ADO.NET with your favorite database! =P

There are also some other tools that you can work with that will ease your data access code pain, such as Enterprise Library or NHibernate, both are frameworks to basically accessing databases.

Enterprise Library can do even more then that!

And NHibernate is an ORM (Object/Relation Mapping) tool that can work just very fine with Oracle.

Remember though, always use Oracle.Data.Client namespace in the Oracle.DataAccess.dll assembly.

What is its equivalent in MySQL ?

As the equivalence for MySQL, I guess it would be MySQL Connector/NET.

Answer 2

It is the Oracle binaries installed that allow communication with the Oracle database. It can be using SQL*Plus, JDBC (type II or IV) or OCI (Oracle Call Interface).

Answer 3

Its a piece of software that allows a remote computer to talk to Oracle. If you were to write a piece of software that communicated with the database, you would use the Oracle Client to facilitate that communication