Recommendations for supporting both Oracle and SQL Server in the same ASP.NET app with NHibernate

Question

Our client wants to support both SQL Server and Oracle in the next project. Our experience comes from .NET/SQL Server platform. We will hire an Oracle developer, but our con

Answer 1

You can easily use NHibernate to make your application database-agnostic by following some basic practices:

• Design your object model first.
• Do not use any database-specific code. You need somebody with good C# experience, not an Oracle developer. Do not rely on stuff like triggers, stored procedures, etc.
• Let NHibernate generate the DB schemas at least initially (you can tweak things like indexes later) It will choose the best available datatypes for each DB.
• Use a DB-agnostic POID generator (hilo or guid) instead of sequences or identity.
• Try to avoid using SQL. HQL and Linq work fine in 99% of the cases.
• Avoid NH features that are not supported by all of your target DB (for example, Future, MultiCriteria, etc)

NHibernate has a great community. You can always ask your questions in http://groups.google.com/group/nhusers besides posting here.