visual studio 2015 - How to uninstall deprecated Oracle Data Provider?

Question

I am trying to install Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2015 so that I can connect to a remote 11g database from SSRS/Visual Studio Projects in general, from my dev machine. When I go to the downloads page, I see this:

So I went to Visual Studio to determine whether I already had ODT, and found this:

However, I don't think I installed this ODP, and it just came with the Visual Studio installation. Is there a way to uninstall this provider, or am I OK to just install the new ODT over top? Lastly, as I did more research for this post I became a little more unsure: does ODAC include ODP.net?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Microsoft OLE DB Provider for Oracle and .NET Framework Data Provider for Oracle are providers from Microsoft, i.e. they are part of your Windows installation.

Indeed, they are deprecated from many years, however there is no reason to remove them. They are just two little DLL's.

It is no problem to install Oracle Provider for OLE DB and Oracle Data Provider for .NET (ODP.NET) from Oracle, the drivers from Oracle and the drivers from Microsoft do not interfere with each other.

Yes, ODAC (Oracle Data Access Components) is a collection of various drivers, ODP.NET, OLE DB, ODBC and a few more.

Just a note, unless you use the ODP.NET Managed Driver all drivers mentioned above require an Oracle Client installation, typically an Oracle Instant Client. I think the Oracle Instant Client is also included in the ODAC package.

Maybe have a look at this post to get a little overview: How to connect to Oracle 11 database from . net