Well, I have been playing with Linq, specifically with Oracle.  First of all, the only way I could find to make this work is to use a third party software, OraDirect.Net by Core Lab.  Their product is great.   Perhaps that statement is biased by the fact that they are the only one's building a library to support Linq to Sql (as far as I know). 

There is certainly room for improvement.  I've crashed VS a few times because I was trying to force OraDirect to do something it doesn't support.  So, error handling needs some work.  Also, there are still a few too many things that require manual labor (I guess I am getting lazy in my old age).  Regardless, the guys at Core Lab are working really hard to address the barrage of feedback on their product.