Oracle ODBC, 64bit and 32bit, same name

Question

we upgraded a user to windows 10 and we are having issues configuring the ODBC connect with Oracle.

We got both the 64bit and 32bit drivers installed. I know the OBDC for 32bit is syswow64 and 64bit is on the system32.

I guess the user has two version of the same application. One uses the 64bit drivers and the other version uses the 32bit driver. They both use the same name inside the obdc connect. When we try to add the 32bit connection it overwrites the 64bit connection. I'm guessing because its the same name.

Is there a way to add two odbc connections with the same name, but one being a 32bit and the other being a 64bit?

The user say you have to map the two drivers together and something and about using the odac oracle install. When i installed i just uses the oracle client install as administrator. The oracle version is 12.2

Answer 1

When I've had this issue, I've had to set up two versions of the driver and reference them independently. I'll have "Oracle32" and "Oracle64" and then reference the one the application calls for. I hope that helps!

Answer 2

In earlier Oracle versions by default both drivers had the same name and the ORACLE_HOME were equal, e.g. OraClient11g_home1.

Now in Oracle 12 or newer this changed by default to OraClient12Home1_32bit and OraClient12Home1

I assume you can simply rename the ODBC driver in registry, i.e.

HKLM\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\ODBC\ODBCINST.INI\Oracle in OraClient12Home1_32bit rename key to Oracle in OraClient12Home

HKLM\SOFTWARE\WOW6432Node\ODBC\ODBCINST.INI\ODBC Drivers\Oracle in OraClient12Home1_32bit rename to Oracle in OraClient12Home1

As far as I know when you add a "User DSN" then the DSN is platform independent, i.e. tries to load the 32/64 bit driver depending on the invoking process. Thus, if you add the same DSN again, it will overwrite the existing one. In order to determine the platform you have to add a "System DSN".

This answer may help you for installation: BadImageFormatException. This will occur when running in 64 bit mode with the 32 bit Oracle client components installed