VB - Deploying an Application using Oracle Data Access

Introduction

It's great when you get your application to run in Visual Studio, or even from the compiled files on your PC, but at some stage you're going to want to deploy or share it. This is where I ran into problems with Oracle drivers.

Oracle  Drivers

You set up your Oracle access in VB by selecting the DLL that came with your client software and adding it to the project resources. Here's what mine looked like in Visual Studio..

Assigning the Oracle library as a project resource.

Then add the following imports into your program module..

Imports Oracle.DataAccess.Client
Imports Oracle.DataAccess.Types

But, although you've set your resources correctly, the DLL location and version is likely to be different on other machines you deploy to. So you'll probably to get errors.

You can start to fix this by setting the Copy Local value to be True, and then the DLL file gets bundled into the release folder when you re-compile.

Set Copy Local

But while this might get your locally compiled version working, it's likely that other machines will still have problems with driver compatibility errors.

Typically you'll see something like this..

Oracle.DataAccess.Client.OracleConnection' threw an exception. ---> Oracle.DataAccess.Client.OracleException: The provider is not compatible with the version of Oracle client

Solution

Download the Instant Client Basic Lite files from Oracle and unzip it to your PC. Copy the following library DLL files and put it into the same deploy folder as your executable:-

oci.dll
ociw32.dll
Oracle.DataAccess.dll 
orannzsbb11.dll
oraocci11.dll
oraociicus11.dll
OraOps11w.dll

Hopefully that will get you going.