R – ADO.NET Data Services & Oracle – RESTful WCF w/ Oracle

In my view ADO.Net data services is for creating restful services that are closely aligned with your domain model, that is the models themselves are published rather then say some form of DTO etc.

Using it for RPC style services seems like a bad fit, though unfortunately even some very basic features like being able to perform a filtered counts etc. aren't available which often means you'll end up using some RPC just to meet the requirements of your customers i.e. so you can display a paged grid etc.

WCF 3.5 pre-SP1 was a fairly weak RESTful platform, with SP1 things have improved in both Uri templates and with the availability of ATOMPub support, such that it's becoming more capable, but they don't really provide any elegant solution for supporting say JSON, XML, ATOM or even something more esoteric like payload like CSV simultaneously, short of having to make use of URL rewriting and different extension, method name munging etc. - rather then just selecting a serializer/deserializer based on the headers of the request.

With WCF it's still difficult to create services that work in a more a natural restful manor i.e. where resources include urls, and you can transition state by navigating through them - it's a little clunky - ADO.Net data services does this quite well with it's AtomPub support though.

My recommendation would be use web services where they're naturally are services and strong service boundaries being enforced, use ADO.Net Data services for rich web-style clients (websites, ajax, silverlight) where the composability of the url queries can save a lot of plumbing and your domain model is pretty basic... and roll your own REST layer (perhaps using an MVC framework as a starting point) if you need complete control over the information i.e. if you're publishing an API for other developers to consume on a social platform etc.

My 2ø worth!

SELECT owner, table_name
  FROM dba_tables

This is assuming that you have access to the DBA_TABLES data dictionary view. If you do not have those privileges but need them, you can request that the DBA explicitly grants you privileges on that table, or, that the DBA grants you the SELECT ANY DICTIONARY privilege or the SELECT_CATALOG_ROLE role (either of which would allow you to query any data dictionary table). Of course, you may want to exclude certain schemas like SYS and SYSTEM which have large numbers of Oracle tables that you probably don't care about.

Alternatively, if you do not have access to DBA_TABLES, you can see all the tables that your account has access to through the ALL_TABLES view:

SELECT owner, table_name
  FROM all_tables

Although, that may be a subset of the tables available in the database (ALL_TABLES shows you the information for all the tables that your user has been granted access to).

If you are only concerned with the tables that you own, not those that you have access to, you could use USER_TABLES:

SELECT table_name
  FROM user_tables

Since USER_TABLES only has information about the tables that you own, it does not have an OWNER column – the owner, by definition, is you.

Oracle also has a number of legacy data dictionary views-- TAB, DICT, TABS, and CAT for example-- that could be used. In general, I would not suggest using these legacy views unless you absolutely need to backport your scripts to Oracle 6. Oracle has not changed these views in a long time so they often have problems with newer types of objects. For example, the TAB and CAT views both show information about tables that are in the user's recycle bin while the [DBA|ALL|USER]_TABLES views all filter those out. CAT also shows information about materialized view logs with a TABLE_TYPE of "TABLE" which is unlikely to be what you really want. DICT combines tables and synonyms and doesn't tell you who owns the object.