Comment on Microsoft's Support

The problem here was the performance of the oracle queries. As I analysed, I felt i was clear about the access path the query should use. I decided to use a Optimizer hint and found that the Microsoft provider for Oracle (msdaora) never returned back certain field attributes whenever there was a presence of Optimizer hints. When we represented the problem to Microsoft, microsoft technical side gave us two solutions which i would call crap.
1) Live with the performance problem....(inspite of knowing it was critical for us)
2) Change to oraoledbprovider (knowing our product was time tested on msdaora).

The second one was tolerable but the first one being a technical person from microsoft support team, the person assigned to us was so good enough to call the it a solution ...

hats off to microsofts support team...