Q: I have ERPM or RPM installed on a Windows 2003 server. The product is configured to use an Oracle back-end datastore. The 32bit Oracle 11g OLEDB provider is installed. The console appliction connects without issue, but the website does not run, and gives an error about the authentication providers cannot be loaded.What is wrong.

A: The answer lies in the installation and registration routine of the Oracle client. Specifically it does not configure itself properly for use with Microsoft Transaction Services (COM/DCOM) on a Windows 2003 host. This was first documented on the Oracle forums in 2001 and has never been resolved for older operating systems (OTN Discussion Forums : Oracle OLE-DB does not work with COM+ ...).

The fix is to edit the registry on the Windows 2003 server. The actual names of the DLLs may change with the version of the installed Oracle client...

Make sure that the registry has following entry in the respective hive.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\MSDTC\MTxOCI]
"OracleXaLib"="oraclient11.dll"
"OracleSqlLib"="orasql11.dll"
"OracleOciLib"="oci.dll"

This need to be changed after installing Oracle Client in the system where MTS/Component Services(COM+) is installed.


The actual problem is that the provider installation for the oracle driver doesn't set the appropriate values so that MTS can initalize the oracle provider with the appropriate transaction support. As such, the provider will load, but can't connect because it can't initalize a transaction. The solution is just to manually inform MTS about where the required dlls need to be loaded from, and then MTS will be able to intiallize the connection correctly.