Access 2010: The Oracle client and networking components were not found

Question

I've installed these Oracle client and ODAC files required for "Microsoft ODBC for Oracle":

ODAC112021Xcopy_32bit
win32_11gR1_client

But alas it will not work!

I'm on Windows 7, using Access 2010.

The PATH variable is set correctly:

C:\product\11.1.0\client_1;%SystemRoot%\system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%\System32\Wbem;%SYSTEMROOT%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;C:\Program Files\Symantec\pcAnywhere\;C:\Program Files\Enterprise Vault\EVClient\;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Windows Performance Toolkit\;C:\Program Files\TortoiseSVN\bin;C:\Program Files\QuickTime\QTSystem\

Am I still missing something? Did I install the wrong files? It could be possible - the Oracle website is a giant mess.

Answer 1

When you install oracle client you need more than PATH environment var. You need an environment var called TNS_ADMIN which should point to the folder which has tnsnames.ora file. Inside that file you must have defined your database connections. It has this structure, I'll put an example:

<addressname> =
 (DESCRIPTION =
   (ADDRESS_LIST =
     (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(Host = <hostname>)(Port = <port>))
   )
     (CONNECT_DATA =
   (SERVICE_NAME = <service_name>)
 )
)

Is a good practice to set too the NLS_LANG environment var too. Without it, maybe you could have some problems related to special chars depending of your database enconding.