In this chapter, you've taken a look at some of the various ways you can use to connect to an Oracle database via ODP. NET: TNS connections Connections without using TNSNames. ora Oracle's EZConnect You've also seen how you can use various connection string parameters to implement connection pooling, integrated Windows authentication, and connections with special privileges. Last, we covered the basic groundwork on TAF and its limitations and how you can ultimately enable it in your application. In the next chapter, you will take a step further and write code to transact with the Oracle database. 67 C H A P T E R 4 Retrieving and Manipulating Data with ODP. NET I was once told during a technical workshop filled with geeky programmers that "an enterprise application is only as strong as its data tier." The programmers loved catchy phrases like that. I'm not sure how true that rings, but I can definitely agree with the most of them that if you don't know your database well enough, you're going to build underperforming routines that the remaining 70 percent of your application will unfortunately be based on. | Pro ODP. NET for Oracle Database 11g by Edmund Zehoo, Paperback | Indigo Chapters