Get started with the Oracle integrations

Oracle Database is a widely-used relational database management system owned and developed by Oracle. The Aspire Oracle integration enables you to connect to existing Oracle servers or create new servers from Aspire with the container-registry.oracle.com/database/free container image.

In this introduction, you'll see how to install and use the Aspire Oracle integrations in a simple configuration. If you already have this knowledge, see Oracle Hosting integration for full reference details.

Set up hosting integration

To begin, install the Aspire Oracle Hosting integration in your Aspire AppHost project. This integration allows you to create and manage Oracle database instances from your Aspire hosting projects:

dotnet add package Aspire.Hosting.Oracle

Next, in the AppHost project, create instances of Oracle server and database resources, then pass the database to the consuming client projects:

var builder = DistributedApplication.CreateBuilder(args);
  
var oracle = builder.AddOracle("oracle")
                    .WithLifetime(ContainerLifetime.Persistent);
  
var oracledb = oracle.AddDatabase("oracledb");
  
var exampleProject = builder.AddProject<Projects.ExampleProject>("apiservice")
                            .WaitFor(oracledb)
                            .WithReference(oracledb);

Use the integration in client projects

Now that the hosting integration is ready, the next step is to install and configure the client integration in any projects that need to use it.

Set up client projects

In each of these consuming client projects, install the Aspire Oracle Entity Framework Core client integration:

dotnet add package Aspire.Oracle.EntityFrameworkCore

In the Program.cs file of your client-consuming project, call the AddOracleDatabaseDbContext extension method on any IHostApplicationBuilder to register a DbContext for use via the dependency injection container. The method takes a connection name parameter.

builder.AddOracleDatabaseDbContext<ExampleDbContext>(connectionName: "oracledb");

Use injected Oracle properties

In the AppHost, when you used the WithReference method to pass an Oracle database resource to a consuming client project, Aspire injects several configuration properties that you can use in the consuming project.

Aspire exposes each property as an environment variable named [RESOURCE]_[PROPERTY]. For instance, the Uri property of a resource called oracledb becomes ORACLEDB_URI.

Use the GetValue() method to obtain these environment variables in consuming projects:

string oracleHost = builder.Configuration.GetValue<string>("ORACLEDB_HOST");
string oraclePort = builder.Configuration.GetValue<string>("ORACLEDB_PORT");
string oracleJDBCConnectionString = builder.Configuration.GetValue<string>("ORACLEDB_JDBCCONNECTIONSTRING");

Use Oracle resources in client code

Now that you've added DbContext to the builder in the consuming project, you can use the Oracle database to get and store data. Get the DbContext instance using dependency injection. For example, to retrieve your context object from an example service define it as a constructor parameter and ensure the ExampleService class is registered with the dependency injection container:

public class ExampleService(ExampleDbContext context)
{
    // Use database context...
}

Having obtained the context, you can work with the Oracle database using Entity Framework Core as you would in any other C# application.

Next steps

Now that you have an Aspire app with Oracle integrations up and running, you can use the following reference documents to learn how to configure and interact with the Oracle resources: