Visual Basic Q&A

Symptoms
When you create a new data connection to an Oracle database with the ODBC Driver (Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers) in Server Explorer, the data connection does not appear in the Data Adapter Configuration Wizard of the OdbcDataAdapter.
Resolution
Connecting to Oracle databases through ODBC is not supported by Visual Studio .NET. Therefore, the data connection does not appear in the Data Adapter Configuration Wizard of Visual Studio .NET.

Symptoms
When you use Microsoft OLE DB Provider (MSDAORA) or the OLE DB .NET Data Provider for Oracle, if you use a LIKE statement to search fixed-length character types, Oracle does not find any rows if their padding is different.
Resolution
If you type a value into a fixed-length field that is shorter than the length of that field, the value is padded with trailing spaces to fill the fixed length. When Oracle matches values for fixed-length fields, it matches the entire length of the string, including any trailing spaces.
NOTE: This behavior is not specific to ADO.NET and also occurs when you use Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects (ADO).