Oracle Client

Oracle client is a facility where you can use to query oracle databases. If you are only interested to just install the ODBC part of the client, then you don't need to install the whole package. Just download the basic package and the odbc package from Oracle.

Create a new folder and unzip the two packages into the directory. You will need two extra file from Microsoft to be present in the same directory also. They are mfc71.dll and msvcr71.dll. Somehow the two files are required but never available in the packages.

Run odbc_install in the directory in dos prompt. It is important to run it in dos prompt as you can see the run result of the installation.

Go to system environment and add ORACLE_HOME and TNS_ADMIN variable. The value of the variables are the directory of the installed packages.

Don't forget to create/copy the sqlnet.ora and tnsnames.ora into the same directory also.

Now you can create an ODBC for the database.

I will not go into detail of the ODBC DSN setup as some users like DSNLESS way to query databases.