ADO.NET in a Nutshell

Creating a Custom Data Provider

ADO.NET provides a set of interfaces that allow you to build a custom .NET data provider. While most DBMSs can be accessed through a specific .NET data provider or through the OLE DB .NET data provider, some reasons to implement a custom data provider include:

• To access proprietary data sources that have neither a specific .NET data provider nor an OLE DB provider that can be accessed through the .NET OLE DB data provider.

• To expose specific functionality of the data source that is accessed through a general-purpose provider. For example, a database that is accessed through the OLE DB .NET data provider might have functionality that isn’t available through that provider. A custom data provider can be written to expose the database-specific functionality.

• To provide application-specific data access architecture to improve performance, simplify programming, and improve maintainability.

An alternative to writing a custom data provider for a proprietary data source is to write an OLE DB provider for the data source and use the OLE DB .NET data provider to access the data through that OLE DB provider. This approach might make sense in situations when broad access to a full set of database features is required. Once the OLE DB provider is written, the data source can also be accessed not only with the OLE DB .NET data provider but by any application or tool that supports OLE DB provider data access.

A custom .NET data provider must at least support the DataSet ...