Linq 2 Sybase ASE database? What are the options?

Question

I have a need to query an existing Sybase ASE database and would like to use Linq syntax for my data retrival.

I don't need write access, nor do I need the full set of Linq operators, just Select(), SelectMany(), Where(), and GroupJoin()

What are options are available?

In particular, I'm wondering about nHibernate and building a new Linq2Sybase provider based on the IQ toolkit.

Answer 1

You can always use ADO.NET to load your data into various collections of IEnumerable<T> and then use LINQ to Objects to query it.

Answer 2

This might do it. There's a free trial.

Answer 3

Hi,

I have spent considerable time researching ORM solutions and Sybase ASE on .NET. I have not found anything free/open-source that supports Sybase ASE.

Did you manage to get NHibernate working? It doesn't look like NHibernate officially supports Sybase ASE.

These are the options I've looked at so far:

1. Linq2Sql -- supports SQL Server only.
2. Microsoft Entity Framework -- support from Sybase for SQL Anywhere only, not ASE for some reason.
3. LLBLGen Pro 3 -- costs £££ although looks very powerful.
4. Data Direct driver -- looks like it supports Entity Framework but I think costs even more than LLBLGen Pro.
5. NHibernate -- doesn't look like NHibernate supports Sybase ASE (http://community.jboss.org/wiki/DatabasessupportedbyNHibernate).

If anyone can suggest any sort of ORM solution on .NET for Sybase ASE, I'd appreciate it!!

Answer 4

I have done extensive research on the overlap between .NET and Sybase ASE. Sybase released theirs ADO.NET 2.0 drivers for ASE 3 years after Oracle. Don't expect an Entity Framework provider anytime soon.

You could use Data Direct, but if your stakeholders are anything like ours, they are still sore about how much they spent on the latest round of license increases from Sybase. They aren't going to be excited about putting even more money into such an antiquated product.

The two ORM solutions currently available are LLBLGen Pro and NHibernate. Our project has successfully used NHibernate against Sybase 12.5 and 15. It works quite well for us. The current set of Sybase ASE drivers are a bit anemic, but they work just fine. We have supplemented these drivers a bit when we needed to. Tinkering with the drivers sounds hard, but its not that bad.

Answer 5

http://bltoolkit.net/Doc.LinqConfig.ashx