Installing 32-bit ODBC Drivers on Vista x64

I have a new computer at work. Our IT people have promised to support Vista 64 starting this year, so I bit.

When I go to the ODBC administrator, there is nothing in the list of drivers that allows me to set up excel, access, or oracle files as data sources. Those drivers were always there in XP, even in my XP x64 installation. I'm seeing a lot of angry chatter about this problem on various forum websites, but I'm not seeing any solutions for getting those drivers in place.

Has anyone here seen that problem and fixed it? How?

Thanks

T

Found this possibly related post from a postgres forum.

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

32 Bit ODBC Drivers in Vista 64

This post isn't really PostgreSQL specific. It also happens with MySQL and Ingres (and any other 32 bit driver).

I am running Vista 64 on one of my machines. I installed Postgres 8.3 and the ODBC drivers. When I tried to setup an ODBC connection, the windows ODBC administrator program ODBCAD32.exe did not list Postgres. I noticed that it also did not list MySQL or Ingres even though I knew I had installed drivers for those databases also.

After a bit of research, I tracked down the issue. My ODBC drivers did in fact install. Microsoft, in all their wisdom, has 2 versions of odbcad32. A 32 bit and a 64 bit. They are both named odbcad32.exe.

It gets better. They put the 32 bit odbcad32.exe in the syswow64 directory. They put the 64 bit odbcad32.exe in the system32 directory. 32 bit apps will pick up the 32 bit registry setting and 64 bit will pick up the 64 bit registry setting. system32 comes before syswow64 in the system path so the 64bit software runs before the 32 bit software.

So, when I manually ran odbcad32.exe in the syswow64 directory, I was able to configure my connections and everything worked hunky dory. I know have a shortcut to syswow64\odbcad32.exe on my desktop for working with 32 bit databases.

I wonder how stable the system would be if syswow64 was in the path before system32? I don't plan to find out.

LewisC

Thanks.

I had eventually figured this out, but it took an awful lot of stumbling around on the internet to find the answer. Nobody I talked with knew the answer. Adding the Oracle drivers was easy, relative to finding the 32-bit administrator.

The fact is that Microsoft needs to make access to that 32-bit administrator more transparent. I'm sure that in the wider 32-bit market, most people do not care about ODBC, but I suspect that those who jump willingly into a 64-bit OS are probably regular ODBC users who need 32-bit access. As it stands, Microsoft has found a good way to annoy and frustrate people.

T

No, none of my database vendors support a 64-bit client. I can install their databases on a 64-bit Windows 2003 R2 SP2 server running SQL 2005 x64 SP2. Most databases don't directly support 64-bit clients.

This is a tangent of sorts.... Is anyone here old enough to remember the marketing of OS/2, v1, the first attempt to move from 16-bit to 32? Compared to that debacle, I think this transition is going rather well. Nobody is forcing you to leave all your 32-bit stuff behind. 32-bit clients seem to run under 64-bit Vista.

My beef is that the stuff getting detailed attention is all market driven. Most of the market wants their email to work. Word, excel, and acrobat reader had better run. A much smaller part of the market worries about whether they can find their 32-bit ODBC administrator. Hence, Vista 64's user interface and help system are inadequate, and the only genuine help comes from places like this.

T