What's the smallest footprint necessary to use an unmanaged Oracle provider?

Question

I'm working on an application written in .NET. We are currently using ODP.NET 11's xcopy deployment for all of our .NET operations and everything is peachy - we can run on machines with no Oracle client previously installed. Peachy, that is, until we came to the part of the application which depends on a library written in COM, which obviously(?) cannot use .NET providers.

What's the least amount of stuff we have to install in order to get an OLEDB or ODBC provider for Oracle working?

Some additional details:

• I believe that any OLEDB or ODBC provider will be good enough for these purposes - performance isn't a big deal.
• We definitely need to use the ODP.NET 11 client for .NET stuff because we're using 11-specific functionality. (So we can't just install the big ol' 10 client.)
• We're eventually going to have an installer, so it's important that we can install whatever we need to via the command line.

Answer 1

You probably want to look at the Instant Client. You would need the basic package as well as either the ODBC Supplement (to use ODBC) or the ODAC (to use OLE DB). This involves installing just a handful of DLLs and environment variables as part of your installer.