In Oracle SQL High Performance tuning, I included an appendix in which I outlined how to achieve good cursor management, bind variables and array processing in the major languages of the day.   I had intended to do the same in Oracle Performance Survival Guide, but I ran out of time and space in the book.  So the examples in the book are generally in Java or PL/SQL only.

I wanted to get up to date on the various languages, some of which (like Python) I haven't used for a while and others (Ruby for instance) I've never used with Oracle.  So I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone by writing a series of blog posts on how to program efficiently in the various languages.

There's lots of best practices in each language, but I think most of us would agree that you at least need to know how to do the following:

1. Use bind variables appropriately.
2. Ensure you are performing array fetch when retrieving more than one row
3. Ensure that you use array insert when doing bulk inserts 

The ways of doing this are different in each language.  In Chapter 6 of Oracle Performance Survival Guide,  I describe these techniques and their performance implications, using Java and sometimes PL/SQL examples.  In this series I'll go through the techniques for other languages. 

Let's start with ODP.NET, which is Oracle's ADO.NET driver for .NET languages such as C#, VB.NET and Powershell (see here for a posting on using Oracle with powershell).