I have not used it for a while, but
a. there are at least two different ODBC drivers for Oracle: the Microsoft
ones, and the Oracle ones.
b. The Microsoft drivers only claim to support a fairly old verson of
Oracle (I cannot remember off the top of my head, but it is probably either
version 6 or 7, compared to the current Oracle database version 10i)
c. I do not know what version of its database Oracle supports via ODBC
nowadays.
d. In my limited experience, Microsoft's ODBC drivers seemed less dependent
on an up-to-date version of Oracle SQL*Net networking environment than
Oracle's drivers, and also seem to have less cryptic keywords and to be be
marginally better documented than Oracle's drivers. In short, it seemed
easier to get a reliable result using the MS drivers than Oracle's.
e. You wil probably encounter problems if you have any character set
encoding issues that are even slightly atypical (i.e. non-ANSI) or need any
large data such as memo fields.
--
Peter Jamieson - Word MVP
Word MVP web site
http://word.mvps.org/
mandy said:
We have recently discovered that Microsoft Word 2000 (which we are
currently using) has the mail merge feature to connect to a Oracle database
using MS Query and ODBC drivers. We would like to know if there are any
organizations out there using this feature with Oracle and if there have
been any problems encountered.
