ORA-12154 could not resolve the connect identifier specified

Question

I have switched over to the 64bit Windows 7 and created a simple web app to test the connection to the database. I am using VS 2010 - plain asp.net web project and I am runn

Answer 1

This error (and also ORA-6413: Connection not open) can also be caused by parentheses in the application executable path and a bug in the 10.2.0.1 or lower oracle client libraries.

You should either upgrade your oracle client library or change the executable path.

Further details see:

• http://blogs.msdn.com/b/debarchan/archive/2009/02/04/good-old-connectivity-issue.aspx
• http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/de-DE/ab662d63-6385-4f73-b27f-d526048f601f/connecting-to-oracle-on-64bit-x64-machine

Answer 2

I had the same issue. In my case I was using a web service which was build using AnyCPU settings. Since the WCF was using 32 bit Oracle data access components therefore it was raising the same error when I tried to call it from a console client. So when I compiled the WCF service using the x86 based setting the client was able to successfully get data from the web service.

If you compile as "Any CPU" and run on an x64 platform, then you won't be able to load 32-bit dlls (which in our case were the Oracle Data Access components), because our app wasn't started in WOW64 (Windows32 on Windows 64). So in order to allow the 32 bit dependency of Oracle Data Access components I compilee the web service with Platform target of x86 and that solved it for me

As an alternative if you have 64bit ODAC drivers installed on the machine that also caused the problem to go away.