Today, Quest Software announced a partnership with Microsoft to deliver a rich Oracle development experience in VSTS Developer 2010. I’m personally stoked about this. I have developed applications for Oracle using various IDEs over the years. I’ve also worked on the client aid building apps in Visual Studio most recently with .net. I’ve always found Visual Studio to be a rich environment and hoped someday that experience would extend to encompass Oracle development. It’s nice to see that day is today!
My dev team and I starting building the Quest database schema provider (DSP) for Oracle support almost 1 year ago. We are leveraging the open extensibility of the database tools layer in VSTS and Quest’s extensive codebase of Oracle support to allow Oracle developers to work offline to design, develop and version control database schemas. Over the coming months we will blog about all of the great features in this product. I can’t wait to get the beta out there to see all the cool ways this gets used.
–Daniel Wood
About Me:
I am currently a development manager at Quest Software, Inc. where I’ve worked since 2001. My time at Quest was spent primarily developing and delivering database management tools. I’ve worked in a wide variety of industries developing database, web, and client applications using a variety of technologies. When I’m not coding I try to hit the beach, the ski slopes or the trails; the further away from a computer the better.
What I hope to accomplish with the database schema provider to is to make life easier for us database developers. Nirvana for this project is to be able to sit down with Visual Studio and focus on solving the real world problems involving an Oracle database instead of spending time fiddling with disparate pieces of software.
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February 24th, 2009 at 5:45 am
Congratulations, man. When Rony said you guys were taking on this project, the only thing I could say is, “Wow.” It must have been a hell of a tough challenge, and I’m looking forward to seeing the results. Way to go!
April 13th, 2009 at 2:19 pm
I’ve explored using “ODP for .NET” in contrast with “.NET Framework Data Provider for Oracle” within Visual Studio 2008 and noticed that while “ODP for .net” does expand vastly upon the capabilities of the “.NET Framework Data Provider for Oracle”, it is still limiting. Specifically, you can view the source code for packages, but the source objects are missing their schema prefix. It should say SchemaName.ObjectName, and it only has ObjectName. Also, the source code is missing a “CREATE AND REPLACE” command in front of the keyword PACKAGE when you view the source code from the Server Explorer window. You only see “PACKAGE Pk_Mail_Pkg”, whereas the actual source code contains “CREATE OR REPLACE PACKAGE MASTER.Pk_Mail_Pkg”. Hopefully, these will be controlled via configuration/setup parameters. Also, both providers allow you the ability to “Run” or “Run on” (meaning Compile) for procedures and functions, but not packages. It seems that the ability to support packages is still a little lacking by both data providers. Hopefully, this will not be neglected when Quest develops their DSP for Oracle.
January 11th, 2010 at 2:40 pm
Jim, now that we’re getting close to our public release we’re in a better position to comment on your concern about package and schema support. We incorporated your early comments into our design principles and now require that every object in an Oracle project be prefixed with a schema name. When you import objects from a database we automatically import the DDL script as “schema.object”. Also programmatic objects such as views/packages/procs/functions are all imported with the create or replace syntax.