Oracle and unicode

Since the .net oracle providers are the only ones that work in x64 it is extremely annoying that it insists on mapping ALL varchar columns in oracle to wstring. Is there a way to fix this? The oledb providers don't have this problem but I don't like being forced to use the 32 bit runtime as a workaround.I remember that this has already been discussed:
I was told, that all .NET providers return UNICODE text. You have to do an explicit data conversion with ALL your fields.

@.Donald Farmer: Since you've said, that when developing SSIS it was meant to avoid implicit data conversion due to performance issues you've had with DTS, I'm wondering how this paradigm copes with this?

@.Brent: Sorry I cannot help...|||

Sorry, I didn't see that post.

I'm just having a hard time explaining to my developers why there's 18 different workarounds to get oracle to work in the first place. The last thing they want to do is explicitly map 150 different columns.

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Brent Mills wrote:

Since the .net oracle providers are the only ones that work in x64 it is extremely annoying that it insists on mapping ALL varchar columns in oracle to wstring. Is there a way to fix this? The oledb providers don't have this problem but I don't like being forced to use the 32 bit runtime as a workaround.

i'm not sure if this will help, but openlink has a 64 bit ole db to obdc provider: http://uda.openlinksw.com/oledb/st/oledb-odbc-st/