Monday, June 11, 2012

Reviewing installed ODBC Drivers on a 64-bit OS

If you are working with a 64-bit OS, you will encounter a problem which was not typically faced in the days of 32-bit OSes--namely, that you will have a separate set of 64-bit ODBC Drivers vs. a set of 32-bit ODBC Drivers.

So, when you type odbcad32.exe at the Run Command, you are ACTUALLY opening up the 64-bit ODBC Drivers that have been installed on the machine and NOT the 32-bit ODBC Drivers.

The 32-bit drivers can actually be found by typing the following path at the Run Command: \windows\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe.  Therefore, if you are looking for drivers such as MS Access and Excel, you will only find these ODBC Drivers available in the 32-bit ODBC Drivers area.

Finally, if you want to dig into the details of the 64-bit ODBC Drivers and the 32-bit ODBC Drivers you can find their corresponding registry locations here:

64-bit ODBC Drivers: COMPUTER\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ODBC\ODBCINST.INI

32-bit ODBC Drivers:
COMPUTER\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\ODBC\ODBCINST.INI

You can read more about 64-bit ODBC DSNs here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/942976/en-us

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