Is ODP.NET required for Oracle 11g Client?

Question

I may be asking the wrong question here, I\'m willing to change it if so.

I have a project that is using the Microsoft.NET Oracle provider (our plan is to change to

Answer 1

I'm adding a new answer since as of this fall (2012) the ODP Managed Code Beta is available. See this link for more information. It is for us highly stable and we are using it in production, mainly because of these reasons:

• No installation (except for entity framework where a simple registration is needed)
• It is smaller than the unmanaged version, the footprint is approx 6 MB.
• It is NOT "bit sensitive", ie Any CPU will finally work with ODP :)
• More intuitive mapping C# types <-> Oracle types (and it solved some problems with EF and model generation from database)
• Supports EZCONNECT (all versions of the unmanaged ODP did not), ie no more tnsnames.ora hassles.

But for transitioning to 64 bit, download the managed ODP driver and change the Oracle.DataAccess reference to Oracle.ManagedDataAccess and recompile :)