Re: ODBC and SqlNet.V2 for MSWindoze

There is (apparently) an Oracle forum on Compuserve - we don't subscribe

• which has the drivers available for free download. I haven't yet found a version 7 driver at the microsoft site, though I also found that response times were far better if I used the Web site, at the right time of the day of course, 4am your time! However, the Oracle drivers can be found bundled with the free 90 day trial of Personal Oracle 7 available at the Oracle web or anon ftp sites (www.oracle.com or (ftp to) www-2.us.oracle.com).

I took this route, but found that, on installing the software it rewrote my existing ORACLE.INI file in Windows, which was a temporary pain since I was already running al lthe CDE2 tools which created a large INI file.  It also screwed up the network section, so when I first ran it it seemed to ignore SQL*Net and assume that the database was a local PO7 version. Still it didn't take long to correct.

However, you might find that as part of the trial software you get a copy of Oracle Objects for OLE which will give you quicker access to the database. It has no front end interface and queries have to aimed at the OLE server object through Visual Basic type code in the calling application (Excel, Word, Access, whatever). You might find it worth the effort to get acquainted - it definately speeds things up.

However, I do tend to take the view that, if this operation was taking people several hours or more to perform manually - pulling reports out of the database and keying them into a spreadsheet, the difference between five and ten minutes will still seem like luxury to them. The advantage I can see of the ODBC route is that it presents the user will a similar mechanism (ie MS Query or such like) for whatever data they want to interrogate - Oracle, DB2, local xBase, even other spreadsheet data, and such familiarity might be preferred to having to re-write query generators for Oracle alone.

See what you think. It is worth investigating all possibilities, if only to say you have tried.

Jonathan Received on Thu Jun 22 1995 - 00:00:00 CEST