Brad Abrams points to an article that shows an upcoming feature of Oracle 10g that appears to be CLR support for stored procedures. Wow, that's very interesting!  I wonder what runtime they're using for their *nix platforms.  Mono?  Or is this only for Windows installations?  I'm going to have to find out.

We use Oracle as the persistence layer of a rather enormous (in terms of disk usage) web-based data analysis tool.  The questions I am really interested in here are:

What runtime are they using? .NET? Mono?  Will this be available only on Windows boxes?  I doubt very much that Microsoft, which is soon to release CLR support in SQL Server (Yukon), would be working closely with Oracle to give them that same feature.  Maybe I'm wrong.

How will they map between Oracle types and CLR types?  This is a huge issue right now just with using Oracle with .NET.  If we're forced to use Oracle-specific types for numbers, it defeats part of the argument in my mind.

I'm going to do some more looking into this, but I'm pretty excited that the CLR would get an endorsement like this from a company that has been pretty far in the Java camp.