My stumbling through
the wilds of .Net, ADO.Net and PostGRESQL continues...
I left out a
critical requirement from my discussion of .Net providers: They must be
compatible with some generic data type inside a .Net application. The most
that is allowed to change is a connection string. If I use ODBC, I can
access the database through OdbcConnection and its related classes. All I
have to do to change from PostGRESQL to SQL Server is to change from a DSN that
refers to a PostGRESQL database to a DSN that refers to a SQL Server
database. When I was trying to get the PgOleDb provider to work, I was
using the OleDbConnectioni class and its relatives with this connection string:
"Provider=PostgreSQL OLE DB Provider;Data
Source=localhost;location=Great_Lakes_10_09;User
ID=caps;Password=asdlkjqp"
Somewhere in the
depths of the registry, "PostgreSQL OLE DB Provider" is associated with the
PgOleDb provider. If I want to connect to a SQL Server database, I presume
that I would be just change the name of the provider in this string to another
name that is associated in the registry with a SQL Server provider. I need
a PostGRESQL provider that can be used through an OleDbConnection object just by
using a connection string like:
"Provider=Some PostgreSQL Provider That Actually Works;Data
Source=localhost;location=Great_Lakes_10_09;User
ID=caps;Password=asdlkjqp"
All of this is
because the first thing a user sees when he starts our application is a dialog
box in which he selects a database. An ini file contains the list of
available names, and each name is associated with a connection string.
When the user selects a name from a listbox, the connection string is read from
the ini file. So the only thing I can change once the application is built
is the connection string. The code has to work for PostGRESQL, SQL Server,
and any other reasonably popular database system. We can't have one
version of the code built for PostGRESQL and another for SQL Server.
Therefore, unless there's some other way of setting it up, I cannot use Npgsql
because I cannot use an NpgsqlConnection object.
RobR
