Installing Oracle Client 12c on Windows 10

If you need to work with Oracle on your development machine, at some point in time, you are going to need to install the Oracle client on your machine.

Fortunately, if you install newer versions of Oracle clients, they will usually remain backwards-compatible with older versions of Oracle server.  For example, you can STILL install and Oracle 12c client while working with an Oracle 11g R2 database!

Without further ado, below you can find the steps to install Oracle Client 12c on your Windows 10 system:

For whatever reason, Oracle does not ship with necessary Visual C++ Prerequisites with its installer, so you will have to also separately install the Visual C++ Redistributable.

Otherwise, you may end up with errors such as the following when attempting to set up your ODBC DSNs for Oracle:

Based on the Oracle Pre-installation requirements, you can install a number of Visual C++ installers on your system ranging from Visual C++ 2010, to 2012 to Visual C++ 2013: http://docs.oracle.com/database/121/NTCLI/pre_install.htm#NTCLI1257

However, in my experience, the ONLY version of Visual C++ I was able to get to work on my machine was Visual C++ 2010 which you can download from here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=5555

NOTE: If you are installing the 32-bit Oracle Client, then you will need to install the Visual C++ x86 installation and likewise if you are installing the 64-bit Oracle Client, you will need to install the Visual C++ x64 installation.