Yesterday and today I had an interesting problem to solve. One of the projects I’m working on involves calling stored procedures on an Oracle server which return User Defined Types (UDT). To get this to work you need to install at least ODP.NET version 11.1.0.6.20, which at the moment is only publicly available in a 32bit. This was not a problem during development and since most .NET components are not architecture specific we were a bit surprised when we couldn’t get data from the Oracle server on the 64bit test environment.

After some investigation we discovered the ODP.NET components are architecture specific, so we needed to find 64bit components (since running in 32bit was not an option). Some research showed, that there is a 11.1.0.7.0 patch for 64bit, which can be downloaded from Metalink, but this requires a previous version to update. The solution to get everything working is downloading and installing the client tools from the 11.1.0.6.0 64bit server and finally applying the 1.4gb (!) 11.1.0.7.0 patch.