Dries Hoebeke on .NET

After installing the ODBC driver for Advantage Database i couldn’t find the driver appear in the datasources managing program. After a bit of mandatory cursing and scouring around the web i found this is a pretty common problem when using a 32 bit driver on a 64 bit system.

It’s important to understand which kind of DSN you have. On an x64 system,
you can create an ODBC connection(DSN) on the 32-bit side of the system or
on the 64-bit side of the system.

32-bit applications will only see ODBC connections created in the 32-bit
side, and 64-bits applications will only see ODBC connections from the
64-bit side. Each kind of application has is own registry.

To setup DSN for 32-bit application you must use:
%WINDIR%\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe
and for 64-bit application you must use:
%WINDIR%\System32\odbcad32.exe

Is what mister Charlie Russel has to say about this and it should help you fix the problem.

This opens a specific odbc datasources manager for 32 bit. Yes they are seperate from the 64 bit. Now after installing your datasource in the 32 bit manager it will also appear in the 64 bit manager allthough you can’t alter anything in the 64 manager.
Still, i think this is kind of lame from Microsoft to not include the 32-bit drivers in the program. I realise there’s probably a good reason for this but it would be nice to get a little more info about this after installing the driver.

Well, hope this solves somebody’s problem .