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Rapidly create and deploy powerful .NET applications that integrate with PostgreSQL-compatible database engines.

LINQ to PostgreSQL Data



LINQ offers versatile querying capabilities within the .NET Framework (v3.0+), offering a straightforward method for programmatic data access through CData ADO.NET Data Providers. In this article, we demonstrate the use of LINQ to retrieve information from the PostgreSQL Data Provider.

This article illustrates using LINQ to access tables within the PostgreSQL via the CData ADO.NET Data Provider for PostgreSQL. To achieve this, we will use LINQ to Entity Framework, which facilitates the generation of connections and can be seamlessly employed with any CData ADO.NET Data Providers to access data through LINQ.

See the help documentation for a guide to setting up an EF 6 project to use the provider.

  1. In a new project in Visual Studio, right-click on the project and choose to add a new item. Add an ADO.NET Entity Data Model.
  2. Choose EF Designer from Database and click Next.
  3. Add a new Data Connection, and change your data source type to "CData PostgreSQL Data Source".
  4. Enter your data source connection information.

    To connect to PostgreSQL, set the Server, Port (the default port is 5432), and Database connection properties and set the User and Password you wish to use to authenticate to the server. If the Database property is not specified, the data provider connects to the user's default database.

    Below is a typical connection string:

    User=postgres;Password=admin;Database=postgres;Server=127.0.0.1;Port=5432;
  5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting PostgreSQLEntities as our entity connection in App.Config.
  6. Enter a model name and select any tables or views you would like to include in the model.

Using the entity you created, you can now perform select , update, delete, and insert commands. For example:

PostgreSQLEntities context = new PostgreSQLEntities(); var ordersQuery = from orders in context.Orders select orders; foreach (var result in ordersQuery) { Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} ", result.Id, result.ShipName); }

See "LINQ and Entity Framework" chapter in the help documentation for example queries of the supported LINQ.