Database Software

You should not do this.

Environment variables such as PATH can only give preference to one item of any given name. With DLLs for example the first DLL of any given name that is found will be the one loaded by Windows. It would be up to the software doing the loading to determine if that is the correct version and most software just looks by name.

That is what is known as 'dll hell'; the wrong version of a dll is being used.

You don't need both clients installed so why do you want to do that?

Pl identify which version of Win 7 - you will need Professional or higher. Pl also identify which exact version of Oracle client.

I have no personal experience with this myself, but the 11gR2 docs say you can install both the 32-bit and 64-bit clients as long as you use different ORACLE_BASE directories.

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/relnotes.112/e23557/toc.htm#CJADGJDB

HTH
Srini

Hi;

By using different path yes you can install.

Please review:
Master Note For Oracle Database Client Installation [ID 1157463.1]
Client / Server / Interoperability Support Between Different Oracle Versions [ID 207303.1]


Regard
Helios

Windows 7 Enterprise

Oracle Client 11g (11.2.0.1.0)

Doesn't this write both ORACLE_HOME paths to the PATH environment variable, and then cause, as mentioned above, DLL hell? With WOW64, it is unclear to me how Microsoft separates 32-bit paths from 64-bit paths.

Unfortunately, my company is running 32-bit Microsoft Office 2007 and other 32-bit programs that use the Oracle thick client install, and my company also uses 64-bit programs that require the Oracle thick client install too.

The solution thus far has been to uninstall one of the programs, and thus clean-up the %PATH% environment variable; or rearrange the order of the Oracle client homes in %PATH% to make the broken one work.

After researching the links, this was still unclear if the 2 clients would conflict with each other.