C# code stored in Oracle

Question

Has anyone heard of the following?
http://www.oracle.com/goto/newsletters/netdev/0409/idc_interop-pdf.html?msgid=7590204
An interesting capability first introduced in Oracle Database 10g is the ability to run
.NET code as Oracle stored procedures. It is common knowledge that much
enterprise application code continues to be developed and maintained in database
stored procedures. Stored procedures provide a declarative (SQL) and thus highly
compact and productive approach to development with the added benefit of a much
lower impedance mismatch factor between database objects and types and
application code objects and types. Thus, much of the business logic of many
important applications was developed, mostly during the era of preapplication server
client/server architectures when the network inefficiencies of putting code on the
client were prohibitive. The emergence of standardized SQL in the late 1980s and
early 1990s provided an easy and productive alternative, but writing application code
in SQL is a skill that seems to be increasingly lost to the more procedurally oriented
world of application developers. What’s more, the set of tools and capabilities (e.g.,
version, configuration, and project management) were largely absent for this type of
code, at least in anything resembling an integrated manner. Thus, to retain the
benefits of code that is tightly coupled to the database and provide languages more
familiar to the typical application developer, a desire emerged to support stored
procedures in multiple languages. Oracle was early to the game in the mid-1990s with
Java stored procedures, and then with SQL Server 2005, Microsoft began to integrate
the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) with the SQL Server stored procedure
engine. Not to be outdone, Oracle invested in similar engineering skills to additionally
support CLR stored procedures in the Oracle database. Today this capability is
available in the form of Oracle Database Extensions for .NET. While the jury is out on
whether such capabilities, for any database, will become mainstream approaches to
application development, there are applications that are simultaneously database and
algorithmically intensive in an intertwined fashion that can benefit greatly from them.
Thus Oracle has continued to maintain this capability and further supports it with the
deployment mechanism in the Oracle Developer Tools profiled earlier.This majority of this article focused on running Oracle in a Windows Server environment. Would that be required to run C# code, as mentioned above?
Thanks,
--=Chuck

Answer 1

Maybe I should've waited before I posted. We're adopting .NET (WinForms) as our primary Development environment, and this was a feature I'd never heard of. Turns out, we're running Oracle on LINUX, so this doesn't work for us without changing O/S's.
Maybe my question should have been ...
For those who have worked with procedures stored in Oracle, written in C# or VB, has it worked well for you? Or is it a relatively underutilized feature? I'm asking, because I am always a proponent of writing business rule logic in PL/SQL in the database tier, but our Applications Manager is concerned that it's tougher to find job applicants with PL/SQL skills - than with C#/VB skills. So he likes the code in a middle tier. This would seem to be the best of both worlds (even if you went to yet another Application Development platform, like ColdFusion, which, since it interacts with the db, it would in-turn also call this C# code).
--=Chuck