The Mimer Provider Manager is a thin layer of software that isolates the application from the underlying provider. It allows an identical application to access several underlying ADO.NET Providers with no or minimal changes to the application.

The general architecture is as shown below:

 

.NET Application
Mimer Provider Manager
ODBC Provider	Ole Db Provider	Product specific provider	...

 

If we look at bit more closely at the internals of the Mimer Provider Manager there is a plugin for each underlying provider. There is also generic plugin that can work with any underlying provider. The generic plugin uses reflection to access the underlying providers. Because of this, performance of the generic plugin may not be as good as the other plugins.

To build a new plugin towards another provider is extremely easy. The changes needed typically take a few hours to complete. The list of providers supported is therefore expected to grow significantly in the coming versions:

 

Mimer Provider Manager
Generic Provider Plugin	ODBC Provider Plugin	Ole Db Provider Plugin	Product specific Provider Plugin	Your Provider Plugin
Any provider	ODBC Provider	Ole Db Provider	Product specific provider	Your provider

 

In the picture is shown the small piece of software used to adapt the Mimer Provider Manager to a specific provider. This piece of software is called a provider plugin or simply a plugin.

See Also

Introducing the Mimer Provider Manager | How to convert an application to the Mimer Provider Manager | How to write a plugin for an additional providers