ODAC insn’t a product as such – it is actually a collection of drivers that provide connectivity to Oracle (listed below). If you are asked to install a particular Oracle driver, such as ODBC, OLE DB or a provider for .Net then in all probability you just need to install whole the ODAC package.
- Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio
- Oracle Data Provider for .NET
- Oracle Providers for ASP.NET
- Oracle Provider for OLE DB
- Oracle Services for Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS)
- Oracle ODBC Driver
For Troubleshooting / FAQ, see the section at the bottom of the page.
Installation Instructions
The following instructions are pretty generic and should apply to all versions of ODAC:
- Ensure that your TMP and TEMP environmental variables do not contain a “!” character (if, for example, your username includes this character) as it causes the Oracle Installer to silently quit, causing much confusion.
- Copy the ODAC software onto the server, unzip it to a temporary location (which can be deleted after the install)
- Run the Setup.exe executable and proceed as follows:
- Click next
- Select Oracle Data Access Components for Oracle Client, and then click next
- Enter an appropriate Oracle Base location (e.g. D:\Oracle)
- Enter a descriptive name for the home name and edit the path to clearly indicate that this is an ODAC install, and whether it is 32bit or 64bit.
- Click next
- Click next
- Leave the port on the default 2030 and click next
- Click next
- Installation is now complete, so click exit.
- Note: The server must be rebooted for some of the components (like OLE DB) to be registered properly.
FAQ / Troubleshooting
I have been asked to install both the 32 and 64 bit versions of ODAC. Which should I do first.
Install the 32 bit drivers first, then the 64 bit drivers. During the 64 bit install you will probably see the error in the next question (which can be ignored).
I get an “OracleMTSRecoveryService already exists” error.
It’s OK, you can safely ignore this error.
The Oracle driver is not listed in the “ODBC Administrator” utility and the developers cannot create a DSN (Data Source Name).
Did you install the 32 bit version of ODAC on a 64 bit OS?
If so, when you run ODBC Administrator from the start menu (or control panel) you are actually running the 64 bit version of the utility which is unable to “see” the Oracle driver. The answer is to run the 32 bit version of ODBC Administrator and create the DSN there. The 32 bit version can be launched by running the following command:
C:\Windows\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe
Users are reporting a “ole db provider not registered” error.
The server needs to be rebooted after installation for the OLE components to be registered.
Users are reporting that “SSIS” does not work.
SSIS stands for SQL Server Integration Services, a tool which allows SQL Server to talk to an Oracle database. Under the covers SSIS uses the OLE DB access component. If the users are complaining about an error with their SSIS connection then it probably means the server was not rebooted after the ODAC installation (i.e. the OLE problem in the above question).