Can't set ORACLE_HOME for TOAD 11.0.0.116 on Windows 7 64-bit with two ORACLE_HOMEs plus ODAC installed

Toad for Oracle
1

Hello,

I’ve just tried everything I could find googling and still haven’t managed to make this work.

My windows XP workstation’s old hard drive crashed, so I’ve just gotten a new drive with a fresh install of Windows 7 64 bit.

I log on to it with an account that has elevated admin privileges and also an account that does not. Before the hard drive crash and OS upgrade, I was successfully using TOAD to connect to local 11g and remote 10g & 11g databases.

I installed the 64-bit Enterprise Edition of Oracle’s 11.2.0.1.0 RDBMS on this local workstation. I can log on to this db via SQL+. It’s in dbhome_1. It’s in the registry as HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORACLE\KEY_OraDb11g_home1.

I then installed the Oracle Data Access Components 11.2.0.3.2 64-bit xcopy version. It doesn’t end up in the central inventory, but does have a registry entry KEY_odac_home.

Then I installed TOAD for Oracle - one of my favorite tools ever - and started it up. It did not find my database’s ORACLE_HOME. I thought, well, maybe it needs a client install to set the right flags in the registry. So I installed an instant client into a client_1 ORACLE_HOME. It created another registry entry. I added the ODAC components there as well.

That did not resolve the problem. TOAD keeps showing me an “ORACLE_ROOT” of SOFTWARE\WOW6432NODE\ORACLE" which is an invalid Oracle Home.

I found the doc on how TOAD populates the homes drop-down. I’ve tried adding “ORACLEHOME=c:\app\oracle…\client_1” to the command line. Also ORACLE_HOME=xxxx and \ORACLE_HOME=xxx and OCIDLL=xxx. (xxx being the path to my client ORACLE_HOME). Adding these parameters does help in that I can see the contents of the tnsnames.ora I am pointing to via a TNS_ADMIN system environment variable. However I still can’t connect to any of them. I get the error:

Cannot find OCI DLL: in Command Line Client.

I’ve also tried adding an ORACLE_HOME xxx keyvalue pair at the top-level ORACLE entry in the registry. Doesn’t seem to make any difference. Have also tried putting the database home first and the client home first in the %PATH% variable - direclty and via the Oracle Home Selector tool in the Oracle Universal Installer. All to no avail.

So…I am at a loss here as to what else to try. At this point I’m resigned to perhaps needing to uninstall some or all of the components, but suspect I could easily go to all that trouble (my workstation is pretty slow) and end up with the same problem as I have now. I would surely very much appreciate any suggestions y’all might have.

I’ve never had to mess with the TOAD command line before; would prefer it to find my actual oracle_homes in a normal way.

Thanks very much!

-Lisa

2

You need toad 11.6 to do 64-bit – read my blog:

http://www.toadworld.com/products/toad-for-oracle/b/weblog/archive/2012/11/28/running-toad-for-oracle-in-a-64-bit-environment-updated.aspx

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toad_problem_path_good.jpeg
toad_problem_path_good.jpeg1680×1050 313 KB
j

pasting in a screenshot showing what TOAD's seeing for my oracle_homes. The first one I don't know how it is finding it. The second one is what I'm passing in. You can see that the bin dir is in the PATH. The oci.dll is in the bin dir.

Thanks.

4

You must use 32-bit client with that version of toad. It will not see the 64-bit home. If you use the instant client make sure that TNS_ADMIN env var is set
and make sure that your instant client home dir in first on you window PATH env var

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Oooohhhh! Thank you, thank you, thank you, Bert. I will give that a try!

6

You are most welcome - it’s nice to actually be of help to someone every now and then :slight_smile:

7

That was it! Dang. Guess I should’ve posted my question sooner…but there kept seeming to be reasonable things to try. Thank you again very much, Bert!!!