That Stupid Club

Nice post by Joseph Guadagno about data­base dri­vers not pro­vided by Microsoft. He missed a few though, so here they are:

Post­greSQL

Post­greSQL needs no intro­duc­tions. Prob­a­bly my favourite open source DBMS. Npgsql is de facto the ADO.NET provider. Per­for­mance and sta­bil­ity seems alright.

Post­greSQLDirect .NET is a com­mer­cial provider, and its sup­posed to out-perform Npgsql while pro­vid­ing more fea­tures. I have never used it so don’t take my word for it.

Fire­bird

Fire­bird was forked from the open source release of Borland’s Inter­Base. Most of you tech-oriented folk might know of it due to the name dis­pute with Mozilla Fire­fox (a.k.a. Fire­bird a.k.a.Phoenix) back in 2003. Its a pretty sweet prod­uct, easy to work with. I have not imple­mented very large projects with it, but the word is that it scales well, and has a small foot­print both on disk (down­loads are ~5 megs) and in mem­ory. The only fea­tures I miss are tem­po­rary tables (com­ing in 2.1 which is in beta now) and mate­ri­alised views.

In any case, the .NET data provider is avail­able for down­load. as well as a DDEX provider.

Sub­Sonic

Prob­a­bly the MVP in my .NET devel­op­ment tool­box at the moment. Sub­Sonic gen­er­ates a full DAL based on an exist­ing data­base, pro­vides Rails-like scaf­folds and pro­vides other help­ful con­trols and util­i­ties. Sup­ports SQL Server 2000 or 2005, MySQL, or Ora­cle (with SQL­Lite, SQLCE, and Post­Gres com­ing soon!).

ActiveRe­cord

An imple­men­ta­tion of the ActiveRe­cord pat­tern by the Cas­tle Project, built on top of NHiber­nate.