Oracle Driver Installation

Question

I am having Oracle 10g installed on my laptop and have downloaded ojdbc14.jar driver for the same. The problem is, my operating system is Windows 7, and I'm not having option to create a Data Source for Oracle since I m not having oracles driver installed. I m having option to create a Data Source for SQL server 6, but I want to get connected to Oracle. Please Help.

Answer 1

By 'Data Sources', I'm guessing that you mean Data Sources (ODBC), under Control Panel > Administrative Tools. Is this correct?

I've set up ODBC Data Sources that connect to Oracle databases before, but to do that I've needed the Oracle client to be installed. However, if you're having the full database installed on your laptop (as your question suggests), you won't need the client - that's only used to connect to databases running on other machines. I believe the full database contains everything in the client, so you should be able to set up an ODBC Data Source pointing to the database on your laptop once the database has been installed.

The ojdbc14.jar just contains the JDBC classes to talk to an Oracle database, and only programs written in Java (and other languages that run on the JVM such as Scala, Groovy or Clojure) can use it. This jar on its own not enough to be able to set up an ODBC data source.

Answer 2

Oracle currently has 1 version that is certified for windows 7. That version is 11.2. They have indicated that they plan to certify 10.2.0.5 if this happens there will likely be a patch that will be needed.

This is probably why the Data Source does not work, either ODBC or OLEDB.

Another possibility is that you have installed the 32bit version of Oracle and your OS is 64bit then you would need to use the 32bit Data Source administrative tools.

Answer 3

I have figured out the solution for my problem. All that I needed to do is put ojdbc14.jar file in my class path and then I was able to use it. Though by doing so, I needed to make some change in the code. I was no more able to use Class.forName("sun.jdbc.odbc.JdbcOdbcDriver") instead I needed to use Class.forName("oracle.jdbc.OracleDriver") also instead of using my data source as "jdbc:odbc:somename" I needed to use jdbc:oracle:thin:@localhost:1521:xe.