Checking Oracle Client Version On Windows

As most of us know, an oracle client software needs to be installed on every machine which wants to connect to an oracle database server remotely. Oracle Client for 11g release 1 can be downloaded from here and the release 2 patch for windows can be downloaded from here.

There would be times when you want to verify the client version installed. Checking the about version popup of one of the configuration tools like Oracle Net Manager doesn’t help much since it doesn’t detail out on the patch version number.

The client version could be verified by executing SQL*Plus but depending on how the installation was done, this client tool may not be installed. Executing tnsping command seems to be sure-shot way to assert the client version since this tool is installed regardless of the install options chosen and this does not change with the release of Oracle client.

The output of tnsping can be piped to a text file which can then be parsed programmatically. More about tnsping utility here.

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