Installing Oracle XE on Windows 7 64 bits

Today, I want to share my experience about installing and accessing an Oracle Express (XE) 10G R2 database. The installer is pretty simple and everything seems to be working as soon as the installation finishes. From the database home page that opens at the end of the installation process, I have been able to unlock "HR" account and see its database objects.

Since one of my goals of installing Oracle XE is to use it with Visual Studio, I started V2010. I then created an Oracle database project and try to connect to my local XE instance. I then questioned myself: "What is the name of my Oracle database instance?" Simple enough, I opened the TNSNAME.ORA located in my "C:\oraclexe\app\oracle\product\10.2.0\server\NETWORK\ADMIN" folder:

From the first line, I can see that the instance name is "XE" and my server name "Christian-PC". So, I tried to connect to my instance using "Christian-PC/XE" (without the double quotes). I got the error "ORA-12154: TNS:could not resolve the connect identifier specified". I was a bit puzzled by this, so I went to command window and started the old SQLPLUS and I was able to connect to Oracle.

So, what was the problem with VS2010? I tried VS2008 with same results. I googled for VS and Oracle XE connectivity. So I thought that I needed to install Oracle client. But, as per Oracle web site, th client is not needed if I use the local server on my local machine .It seems that people using Windows 32 bits did not have any problem connecting to Oracle from VS without client installed.

Finally found out that I needed to install ODP.net on my machine in order to have it working with VS on a 64 bits machine. So, I downloaded and installed it with all default options and:

Now, I'll be able to test Toad Extensions for Visual Studio! I send other post(s) over the week on it.

Christian