Which Oracle Client and ODP.NET version should I install (using .NET 3.5)

Question

After quite some time developing with Oracle Client 9.2.0.7, and the ODP.NET to go with it, targeting .NET 1.1, we are upgrading our code line to .NET 3.5 and we are also considering upgrading the Oracle Client version.

I wonder if there are any "gotchas" as to whether specific versions should be used/not used?

For example Oracle Client 9.2.0.4 was known to be buggy with .NET and the upgrade to 9.2.0.7 was non optional.

Apparently the current Oracle Client version is 11.1.0.7.0 (from here). Has anyobody had specific issues with this version and would recommend other version? Sometimes installing the latest release isn't the best choice...

Answer 1

Take a look at the following document from Metalink, it might help. It contains a matrix of ODP Driver Version, Supported Operating System, SQL*Net, RDBMS, .NET Framework, and Visual Studio.

Subject: Oracle Data Provider for .NET (ODP) Supported Configurations

Doc ID: 726240.1

Answer 2

If all you need to do is talk to Oracle, then you can use my instructions found here for the Oracle 11 Client XCopy deploy.

Answer 3

The latest version is the only version that you can use if you have visual studio 2008 unless you don't want any of the snazzy add ins that Oracle provides with it (such as SQLPlus and such). I use the latest version to connect to a 10g database just fine.