DSN connection not available in connection manager

Question

Hi -- I am having problems connecting to an ODBC data source with SSIS.
I am trying to connect to a mysql database.  The connection is set up in "Administrative Tools" as a System DSN, and I can sucessfully connect using "Test" from there.
But the connection is not shown as available in SSIS.
In Connection Manager, I create a new ADO.NET connection, choose New, ODBC data provider, but my system DSN connection is not in the dropdown (no ODBC connections are), and if I try to specify it with a connection string
Dsn=ConnectionName;
I get:
Test connection failed because of an error initalizing provider.  Error [IM002] [Microsoft] [ODBC Driver Manager] Data source name not found and no default driver specified.
I have tried recreating it, creating a new data source with a new name, but none of the Dsn's come are seen by SSIS.
To make it more frustrating, it was working just days ago and I don't know what changed...
Any help appreciated,
Mike

Answer 1

The BIDS development environment is 32 bit. So it looks for the 32 bit providers at design time. However, when the package is run in BIDS, it will use the 64-bit providers, as long as the Use64BitRuntime property of the project is set to TRUE.
Outside of BIDS, which set of providers is used depends on which version of DTEXEC you run. There is a 32-bit version and 64-bit version - each will load the matching provider. Something else to be aware of - not all providers have 32- and 64-bit versions. The Jet providers (used for Excel and Access) only have 32-bit versions, for example.