I am investigating the feasibility/options for allowing import to and export from SQL Server 2008 (or earlier as well is pos) to our own proprietary object database. Our system allows us to persist .Net objects/structs with indices and so on, programmatically these appear (to .Net code that uses the DB) as collections or dictionaries. Now I am no authority on SQL Server, but when I start SQL Server Import Export Wizard, to do (say) an export from SQL Server, the destination has a list of options, I note stuff like .Net Framework Data Provider for ODBC, Oracle and SQL Server. Does this all fit into some model? for example can I create my own "Data Provider"? if so what actually is it (a service? a class library?) To export from SQL Server to our system, we have the technology to dynamically define a struct based on columns, types etc and then populate instances of that struct, these can be sent over the network to a server process that has the capability to create a struct (if not already defined) and then begin to persist instances of it. If a "Data Provider" is some code that handles the translation of SQL Server DataRecords to some proprietary form, then I guess I can do all this. Are there book, articles, exmaple of all this ? Thanks Cap'n UPDATE, OK I can see how this works sort-of, there are some examples of creating a Data Provider in the MSDN (eg this one). However nowhere can I find out how these are installed on a system, for example how does SQL Server "know" which providers to show in the drop-down list of the import/export wizard? Thx

I think to provide you with a better solution it would be more useful if you could share with us what you have as your data store you want to load the data to. SQL Server can import into many data sources, in some cases you can get around by outputting the data to a flat file and load it into your system. Besides, in most cases installing the right driver and then setting ODBC will enable you to transfer data back and forth. Further to that, SQL Server prodies SQL Server Data Import/Export Wizard (http://blogs.lessthandot.com/index.php/DataMgmt/DBAdmin/title-12). PS: I just do not believe you need to build a data provider to just get some data.Arthur My Blog

I think to provide you with a better solution it would be more useful if you could share with us what you have as your data store you want to load the data to. SQL Server can import into many data sources, in some cases you can get around by outputting the data to a flat file and load it into your system. Besides, in most cases installing the right driver and then setting ODBC will enable you to transfer data back and forth. Further to that, SQL Server prodies SQL Server Data Import/Export Wizard (http://blogs.lessthandot.com/index.php/DataMgmt/DBAdmin/title-12). PS: I just do not believe you need to build a data provider to just get some data. Arthur My Blog Hi Arthur We have an in-memory data persistence engine, data is persisted in memory as collections of items (structs or classes) these can appear as dictionaries or more richer collections with keys, indices and so on. The engine persists both data and type information (including assemblies), the data is managed by an underlying memory sharing/mapping management library. The entire system therefore appears a a very .Net friendly object persistence system, it provides very high performance for reading/writing/updating etc. So in the case of SQL Server import/export we want to export (in effect) collections of structs/classes INTO SQL Server and import query results (or entire tables) INTO the persistence engine. The persistence engine is not relational (other than some support for LINQ which is gradually improving). I've been creating special CLR modules to helpo with this but wanted to know if I could leverage the import/export wizard to make the persistence engine a fisrt class data store - in SQL Server's eyes ! Cap'n