Every time I deploy a new machine I have the chore of installing the Oracle drivers/client in order to be able to connect to odsprod/banprod from my desktop (when testing locally in Visual Studio). As I unfortunately misplaced the old directions to do so, with the help of Mike Brake I was able to recreate them, in case its of benefit to others. You may wish to alternatively download the instant clients at https://aar.is.colostate.edu/lan-managers-info.html.
- Extract each of the instant client zipped packages to your local drive (c: – create a new folder called oracle, copy and paste instant_client from each package). Extract/place files in order (so that ODBC comes after basic – some files will be overwritten)
- Copy tnsnames.ora and sqlnet.ora into C:\Oracle\instantclient_11_2
- Under advanced system settings, click Environment Variables
- Add an entry (to System variables) with the name TNS_ADMIN and value C:\oracle\instantclient_11_2
- Add an entry (to System variables) with the name LD_LIBRARY_PATH and value C:\oracle\instantclient_11_2
- Edit the path variable, it should end with ;C:\oracle\instantclient_11_2
- Right-click the C:\Oracle\instantclient_11_2\odbc_install.exe and run as administrator
- That’s it. Test by going to control panel, administrative tools, Data sources (ODBC) and adding/testing a connection to the instantclient_11_2
- While in Visual Studio, you may need to go to the solution properties –> Build –> select Platform target of x64 to avoid “BadImageFormatException. This will occur when running in 64 bit mode with the 32 bit Oracle client components installed” errors