ODP.NET

New job, new to Oracle and new to spatial concepts... and french speaking, so please be kind with me! ;-)

I was given the job of finding a way to optimize a software used by the people at my new job... Currently they convert, once per day, all the data from Oracle to SQL Server because they're using (C# / .NET) and they say that they cannot access sdo_geometry data type directly with ODP.NET. So they convert all sdo_geometry to WKB, and use an "image" data type in SQL Server to store the new WKB value.

I really want to find a better way to do this, because it's sad that they are losing the power of spatial data type with the conversion to SQL Server! So I've made some research on how to access sdo_geometry directly from Oracle and I found that the new ODP.NET (11.1.0.6.20) seems to support a way to do that...

I installed the new version of ODP.NET, I looked at the sample (Object3 from UDT solution), but I'm still not sure how all this works!?

The sample use a table with only one geometry field, so I want to know if this UDT concept can allow me to request a table containing different fields (text,numeric,sdo_geometry,etc.) and map the sdo_geometry field from the result to a .NET type? If so, can someone please give me basic information on how to do this?

In the sample, they create user-defined type on the server... Is it necessary to do something on the Oracle Server to make this work with sdo_geometry data type? Because I only have read access to the Oracle Server!

The sample Object3 from UDT solution (odp.net) seems to be really close to the real sdo_geometry data type (from what I know)... Would it be really hard to modify it to do what I need?

I know, it's probably too much new concepts for me at the same time, but I really want to show them that there is probably a better (and faster) way to use sdo_geometry in their .NET application without losing the power of Oracle spatial data types!

Thank you for your help!