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