OpenLink and Firebird have been added to the list of supporters of the Entity Framework by releasing their ADO.NET 3.5 providers.
OpenLink’s provider offers access to native Virtuoso data (SQL, XML, or RDF) and to Virtuoso Link Tables based on the following external data sources: Oracle (versions 7.x to 11.x), Microsoft SQL Server (6.x to 2005), IBM DB2 , Sybase (4.2 to 12.x+), IBM Informix (5.x to 11.x), Ingres (6.4 to 9.x), Progress (7.x to 10.x), MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Firebird. The Virtuoso provider has the following features:
- ADO.NET 3.5 compliance
- .NET Entity Frameworks compatibility
- Full integration with Visual Studio 2008
- ADO.NET Data Services compatibility
- LINQ to Entities compatibility
- High-Performance & Scalability
- High Security
- Support for Native and 3rd party RDBMS engines and Web Services
The Virtuoso provider comes in two flavors: Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista/2008 (32 Bit) and Windows XP/2003/Vista/2008 (64 Bit). Also, the Virtuoso Universal Server for Windows has been updated to support ADO.NET 3.5.
Jiří Činčura announced the Firebird’s ADO.NET data provider supporting .NET 3.5, including Entity Framework. The Firebird 2.5.0 provider is a beta one and both binaries and source code can be downloaded.
Other ADO.NET providers are: IBM ADO.NET, Sybase SQL Anywhere, PostgreSQL (Npgsql), Devart, Oracle, Core Lab, MySQL.