Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Cannot see Oracle ODBC driver in datasource administrator in Windows 64 bit

Problem:
I cannot see Oracle ODBC driver in datasource administrator in Windows 2003 64 bit. Here you can see that the ODBC driver is avialable. But i am not able to get this in my windows environment.


Cause:
64 bit 32 bit incompatibility issue for odbc driver, data source administrator and application.
Solution:
I have Windows 2003 64 bit, Oracle 10.2 32 bit Client and 64 bit application.
After googleing around,
I found that there is two versions of odbc datasource administrator:
The default one, is 64 bit which we use Start menu for opening it.
In order to open the 32 bit version I used: %windir%\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe.
With the help of 32 bit version datasource administrator, I could see my 32 bit odbc driver listed.
I extracted this rule of thumb: If your application is 32 bit, then your data source must use Oracle 32 bit client as well.
Last words, beware of 3 pieces:
1- your application (which uses DSN definition),
2- Oracle client
3-data source administrator
All pieces must have same version, in my case it is 64 bit and therefore I installed 64 bit client.
Further reading:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942976

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