The Mimer Provider Manager allows an application to transparently access ADO.NET providers. The application is isolated from the specifics of different providers. It allows an identical application to access several underlying ADO.NET providers with no or minimal changes to the application.

The benefits of this architecture are the following:

• Independent on underlying provider used.
• Easy to switch to another provider.
• Possible to pick the highest performance configuration without any application changes.
• Not locked into a specific database.
• Allows concurrent access to different providers.

The interfaces supported are the standard interfaces for accessing ADO.NET providers. This means that applications that use the Mimer Provider Manager by default does not use ADO.NET provider specific features. However, the architecture allows the applications to also access provider specific features. This is done in a manner that makes it clear that this is happening. So, for example, an application may consist of 98% provider independent code and 2% provider specific. When using the Mimer Provider Manager the 2% are easily identifiable.

The current version of the Provider Manager supports the following underlying providers:

• Mimer SQL
• SQL Server
• Microsoft's Oracle provider
• Oracle's native provider
• ODBC Provider
• Ole Db provider
• Generic provider that can work with most underlying providers.

In time, more providers will be supported.

Related Sections

Architecture of the Mimer Provider.

Learn about the different parts of the Mimer Provider Manager.

Mimer Provider Manager concepts.

Learn about the different concepts and objects used by an application to access different providers and databases.

How to convert an application to the Mimer Provider Manager.

This section guides you through the steps needed to convert an existing ADO.NET application to use the Mimer Provider Manager.

The Mimer Provider Manager configuration file.

The application configuration file contains information that makes the application independent of the specifics of accessing data sources, providers and SQL filters.

Writing applications for the Mimer Provider Manager.

Learn about writing ADO.NET applications. In specific, guidelines for writing provider independent code is covered.

Accessing provider specific features.

If you want to take advantage of provider specific features, this section describes how you can do this.

How to write a support for additional providers and SQL filters.

Learn how to extend the Mimer Provider Manager more providers and SQL Filters.