1. Developer's Guide
  2. Installing and Configuring Oracle Data Provider for .NET
  3. Installing Oracle Data Provider for .NET, Unmanaged Driver

Installing Oracle Data Provider for .NET, Unmanaged Driver

Oracle Data Provider for .NET, Unmanaged Driver can be installed through Oracle Database software or XCopy. The latter is an Oracle Data Access Components (ODAC) software installation. Unmanaged ODP.NET software is available from Oracle's website for download. This section provides details on unmanaged ODP.NET installation

Administrators use XCopy to deploy Oracle Data Provider for .NET to large numbers of computers for production deployments. The XCopy has a smaller installation size and fine-grain control during installation and configuration than Oracle Universal Installer.

Note:

This section describes non-ODAC installation using the Oracle Universal Installer for database server or client. For installation and configuration using the XCopy install, refer to the README.TXT file that is part of the XCopy installation.

Additionally, Oracle Data Provider for .NET Dynamic Help is registered with Visual Studio, providing context-sensitive online help that is seamlessly integrated with Visual Studio Dynamic Help. With Dynamic Help, the user can access ODP.NET documentation within the Visual Studio IDE by placing the cursor on an ODP.NET keyword and pressing the F1 function key.

See Also:

Configuring for Entity Framework Code First

File Locations After Installation

The Oracle.DataAccess.dll assembly is installed to the following location:

.NET Framework 4:

ORACLE_HOME\odp.net\bin\4 directory

Search Order for Unmanaged DLLs

Unmanaged ODP.NET consists of managed and unmanaged binaries. Through the use of the DllPath configuration parameter, each application can specify the ORACLE_HOME\bin location that the dependent unmanaged Oracle Client binaries are loaded from. However, the ORACLE_HOME must have the same unmanaged ODP.NET version installed as the version that the application uses. Otherwise, a version mismatch exception is thrown.

The Oracle.DataAccess.dll searches for dependent unmanaged DLLs (such as Oracle Client) based on the following order:

  1. Directory of the application or executable.

  2. DllPath setting specified by application config or web.config.

  3. DllPath setting specified by machine.config.

  4. DllPath setting specified by the Windows Registry.

    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Oracle\ODP.NET\version\DllPath

  5. Directories specified by the Windows PATH environment variable.

Upon installation of unmanaged ODP.NET, Oracle Universal Installer sets the DllPath Windows Registry value to the ORACLE_HOME\bin directory where the corresponding dependent DLLs are installed. Developers must provide this configuration information on an application-by-application basis.

Note:

Oracle.DataAccess.dll uses the unmanaged DLL, OraOps21.dll.

Unmanaged ODP.NET and Dependent Unmanaged DLL Mismatch

To enforce the usage of Oracle.DataAccess.dll assembly with the correct version of its unmanaged DLLs, an exception is raised if Oracle.DataAccess.dll notices it has loaded a mismatched version of a dependent unmanaged DLL.