Oracle 9.2 OLE DB Provider Not Found

Question

Hi people,
Seem to have a similar issue with an earlier poster.... on two different machines (one with Visual Studio Enterprise Architect and the .Net Framework installed and one without using the default general purpose enterprise edition of 9.2 database install). Existing IIS + ADO applications now complain that the OraOLEDB.Oracle provider is not found. However, existing C++ -> ADO component applications do not have the same issue....
Giving "Everyone" "Full Control" to %ORACLE_HOME% and subdirs as an NTFS permssion seems to work but also seems a bit drastic.... Anyone with a more focused explanation of what is going wrong? Anyone with a more secure workaround, perhaps?
Thanks in advance,
Lachlan Pitts

Answer 1

All,
Although not part of the Oracle OLE DB Team, or with any real qualifications, I do have a little information gained from experimentation...
For those not up to date on this thread, the issue we all seem to have is when using the Oracle 9i Release 2 (9.2.0.1.0) OLE DB Provider (OraOLEDB.Oracle) with Microsoft's .NET framework, we receive the error OraOLEDB.Oracle not found when we attempt to open a connection. In the past, some have suggested that giving Everyone the security access Full Control to the Oracle home directory (such as C:\oracle\ora92) solves the problem. I tried this and to my surprise it did work. Unfortunately, I did not try giving the ASPNET user full control first (doh).
The reason this frustrates me is that something permanently changed while the permissions were open. The permissions can now be removed, and the provider still works fine.
The only modification I saw inside the Oracle home directory was to new oramts/trace/OracleMTSRecoveryService(*).trc files, with the timestamps corresponding to when the ASP.NET worker process (aspnet_wp) was started/restarted. I do not see the Oracle MTS Recovery service running on another machine with Oracle 9.0.x on it (although this may not mean anything). After these trace files were written I was able to remove the permissions changes I made (Everyone/Full Control), restarted the machine, and the OLE DB provider still worked fine -- seemingly using the latest trace file available (as I could delete all but the latest trace file). This file was being locked by the Oracle MTS Recovery service.
However, I can stop the Oracle MTS recovery service, delete the trace files, restart the web service, reboot the machine, etc, and still, the OLEDB provider works fine. Something else must have permanently changed while the permissions were open, maybe even something that didn't go into the Oracle home directory but something that was able to go somewhere else after the first trace file was written... If anyone can find out what it is (in the registry maybe?) that allows the OLEDB provider to work, I'd really like to know.
I think that this is a big enough problem that the Oracle developers should look at it -- maybe they would have insight as to what that MTS recovery service is up to, and how it relates to the OLE DB provider in regards to a fresh installation. Especially considering that Oracle is advertising this as the first OLEDB provider with full support for the .NET framework.
Best Regards,
Paul Hooper