Re: 32 bit-ODBC-Driver from MS

Kingsley Idehen <100136.115_at_CompuServe.COM> writes:  

>What about a Driver that simply works ?
>
>If as I suspect many ODBC early adopters would simply like to get
>this stuff up and running, simply visit :
>http://www.openlink.co.uk
>and download a Driver that works as opposed to spending vital
>company time on DLL treasure hunts and hoax 32 Bit Drivers etc..
>
>A 32 Bit Driver should work out of the box or shouldn't it ??
 

By all means you have a very important point.  

Microsoft licensed and then shipped the Visigenic ODBC driver for Oracle in their Visual Basic 4.0 and Access 95 products, but apparently never tested it using Windows 95 (despite almost two years of beta-testing Windows 95).  

I still cannot get the workaround to work on my Windows 95 machine; it still gets an error during the Oracle logon step. My machine has some extra networking protocols that might make it "special", but then my 16-bit ODBC works just fine to get to Oracle.    

The OpenLink drivers use an architecture that does not currently meet my needs:  

  A "generic" protocol is used on the wire, and OpenLink server components   must reside on the database server to translate the "generic" protocol   into native database calls.  

I do not have access to the server machine, and my DBA does not intend to modify his server setup.  

I need an ODBC driver that converts to SQL*Net protocol on the client, so that the server is unaware I am using anything other than Oracle software.    

Apparently, the Visigenic driver works fine under Windows NT. I cannot get it to work under Windows 95, and those who CAN must use the ugly hack technique to do it.    

Since Windows 95 is really a hybrid 16-bit/32-bit environment, I have advised my clients to remain in the 16-bit environment for any ODBC-compatible client tools that need to talk to Oracle databases.  

Thus, some of our "power users" have replaced Excel 95 with Excel 5.0, and are remaining with Access 2.0 instead of moving to Access 95.  

Fortunately, Excel 5.0 and Excel 95 share an identical on-disk file format for their spreadsheets. (The same cannot be said for Access 2.0 and Access 95.)    

So again, yes you are correct that this stuff should just work, especially when Microsoft ships it with their own products. However, reality has bitten again, and we must take care to avoid becoming rabid.  

• Rick --

(Rick Rutt is a system architect living and working in Midland, Michigan.) Received on Tue Jan 23 1996 - 00:00:00 CET