DLinq Providers

The last weeks I have been working on DLinq "providers". The idea is to connect with DLinq to other databases than SQL Server, so we may need to use other mechanisms to connect to the database, need to generate slightly different SQL etc. As a first experiment I wrote a basic Jet provider (to access Access databases). It has not been decided whether and how this experiment will be made public, but I would be interested to know what customers would want.
Obviously it would be interesting to look at other databases, and as a private hobbyist I probably would just download one of the freely available databases and try it, but being an employee of a software company, clicking "I Agree" on the "End User License Agreement" of another software company is a non-trivial operation... So besides Access I was looking at other more exotic possibilities, and one thing that occasionally comes up in customer interactions is Analysis Server. Of course, this has a different flavor than Access since it has more fundamental differences to SQL Server, but it is an interesting idea.
I should make explicit that there are currently no plans for adding such a provider in any form, since right now other things (like accessing other databases) are much more important. But I am still curious how customers would see this, is that something you would use? How big would the benefit be for you?

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• Anonymous
  September 08, 2006
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