I saw this in a bug report reply from appeon support, and i am hoping to get some clarification from appeon:
"As OLE DB doesn’t support 64-bit, we will not enhance its support. "
Microsoft had announced that OLE DB is NOT deprecated, and in fact has released new OLE DB drivers. These drivers are 64 bit and 32 bit.
What is the plan for ole db support from appeon?
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/sqlnativeclient/2017/10/06/announcing-the-new-release-of-ole-db-driver-for-sql-server/
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=56730
they got rid of original native client, then they came back with a new native client which was THE future, and now (2014?) they deprecated native client again. pretty similar to their ODBC story: 'OLEDB is replacing ODBC so stop using ODBC' and then 'odbc is replacing OLEDB so stop using OLEDB'
ADO.net is known to be slow. I think OLEDB really caught on because the old client was/is shipped with windows (the newest one is not currently being shipped with windows).
In any case, the new oledb driver does have new features.
I was just reading last month where MS (after many, many SS customers complained) is now planning to bring back and enhance the SS native interface as well. Hard to know what MS is going to do these days with SS or its O/S ... https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-1809-microsoft-reveals-features-its-dropping-in-october-2018-update/
Regards ... Chris