Getting Power BI Desktop to work with Oracle ODAC AFTER version 12.2

[dramus]

Power BI Desktop needs the Oracle data providers installed at the machine level. After ODAC 12.2, Oracle removed this option from the install, which means out of the box Oracle 18.x and 19.x ODAC installs are not seen by Power BI Desktop. I've spent the last 24 hours installing and uninstalling various versions of ODAC trying to get them to work with Power BI Desktop.

I'm limiting this to the 64bit install (Because that is what I have) and .NET 4.0, becuase that is what Power BI Desktop needs.

I can now report I have ODAC 19.3 working with Power BI Desktop (May 2021). This is thanks to Google and a lot of digging around. I've put a link to the original article I found that helped me get the data providers installed, as this was not my own work! (Power BI Github comment ), I'm just documenting it here for others.

1. You need to match the 32/64 bit version of the Oracle ODAC install to the version of Power BI Desktop you have installed. You can find this by starting up Power BI Desktop and clicking Help->About.
2. You will need an account with the Oracle website to download the 64-Bit 19.3 ODAC installer 
3. Unzip the file into a directory with a short name and no spaces in the path. The Oracle installer hates spaces and deep directories.
4. Run the Setup.exe with Administrator privileges. Other than selecting the oracle base directory and possibly changing the path for the install, you shouldn't need to alter any other settings. If youdo not have a thsnames file, it will prompt you to create a first entry for one.
5. After the ODAC install completes, start an Administrator Command prompt window and navigate to the ODAC install directory.
6. Navigate to odp.net\bin\4 
   NOTE: Look in c:\windows\microsoft.net\framework64 to see the correct versions for .net there should be a v4.0.xxxx folder use these strings as frameworkversion below. In my case it was 4.0.30319.
   You will need to run:

OraProvCfg.exe /action:gac /providerpath:"Oracle.DataAccess.dll"

OraProvCfg /action:config /force /product:odp /component:dbproviderfactory /frameworkversion:v4.0.30319 /providerpath:Oracle.DataAccess.dll​

7. One last thing, from the main install directory take a copy of the oraons.dll and copy it into the bin directory.

Having done the above I was able to start Power BI Desktop and connect to an Oracle data source.

[dramus]

That's the 12.2 install of ODAC, my post was for the 19.3 install.

[Anonymous]

Oh ok . Thanks a lot for your patience and time , will repost my ask.

Thanks

[amitchandak]

@dramus , Thanks for sharing. Oracle connection is a bit difficult. I also faced a lot of issues when I connected it for the first time.