How to check if an OLEDB driver is installed on the system?

delphi oledb ado
Karl-Otto Rosenqvist picture Karl-Otto Rosenqvist · Sep 22, 2008 · Viewed 53.5k times · Source

How can I make sure that a certain OLEDB driver is installed when I start my application? I use ADO from Delphi and would like to display a descriptive error message if the driver is missing. The error that's returned from ADO isn't always that user-friendly.

There are probably a nice little function that returns all installed drivers but I haven't found it.

Answer

Rogerio Ueda picture Rogerio Ueda · Sep 28, 2012

This is an old question but I had the same problem now and maybe this can help others.

In Delphi 7 there is an procedure in ADODB that return a TStringList with the provider names.

Usage example:

names := TStringList.Create;
ADODB.GetProviderNames(names);

if names.IndexOf('SQLNCLI10')<>-1 then
  st := 'Provider=SQLNCLI10;'
else if names.IndexOf('SQLNCLI')<>-1 then
  st := 'Provider=SQLNCLI;'
else if names.IndexOf('SQLOLEDB')<>-1 then
  st := 'Provider=SQLOLEDB;';

Related questions

Delphi with SQL Server: OLEDB vs. Native Client drivers

I have been told that SQL Native Client is supposed to be faster than the OLEDB drivers. So I put together a utility to do a load-test between the two - and am getting mixed results. Sometimes one is faster, …

Read More
ADO with XLSX files in Delphi XE

The issue here is ADO connection with Excel - is this still the standard way to read/write excel files within a Dephi XE environment? We're coming up with multiple issues when reading/writing using the ACEOLEDB driver (ACE 12) and …

Read More
The application was unable to start correctly (0xc000007b)

I have a client/server app which I have been developing on a single PC. Now it needs two serial ports, so I borrowed a PC from a friend. When I build my app and try to run or debug …

Read More