I have been looking at the various methods for accessing a database from silverlight and all of the different ways are confusing me. I have come across so many methods and terms and I am not sure what is the difference between them or how they are related. There is ADO.NET, WCF Data Services, Linq to SQL, Linq to Entities, etc. What is the difference between them, especially what is the difference between WCF Data Services and Linq to Entities?
I am trying to find the best way to access an oracle database from silverlight and from what I have found, Linq to SQL will not work because it only works on SQL Server. I found a tutorial of creating a ADO.NET entity model from my database and then creating a WCF Data Service for it, but linq I can use to query it is quite limited (no projection, where is limited, etc)
What would be the best way to go about querying my oracle database preferably using Linq in the silverlight application?
It sounds like you haven't explored all of the options thoroughly, but if you want to use LINQ (via IQueryable), your best bet is using WCF RIA Services. You could use this with NHibernate or the newly released Entity Framework for Oracle.