At the beginning I would like to say that I don't know ORACLE, but I guess I'm a good googler.

I tried to make Toad worx using Oracle client but I didn't find Oracle client for Windows (32 bit).

Then I found something called Oracle Instant Client which is smaller and the most important thing I found Windows 32 version from it.
After I downloaded Oracle Instant Client I was stuck as it contains nothing except 2 jars and some dlls.
So I go to Oracle Instant Client to know how to install this to find no usfull info just put jar in PATH and start your application.

Then I start googling for [Oracle Instant Client and Toad] to find an amazing blog post.

I followed the steps wrote on this blog and every things works fine.

The steps are:

1. Dowload Oracle instant client
2. Create a directory called oracle with the following subdirectories

c:\Program Files\oracle

├─bin

└─network


  â””──admin

3. Uncompress the instant client under the bin directory
4. Add the following environment variables:
   • SQL_PATH = c:\Program Files\oracle
   • TNS_ADMIN c:\Program Files\oracle\network\admin
   • LD_LIBRARY_PATH = c:\Program Files\oracle
5. Copy the tnsnames.ora in the following directory: c:\Program Files\oracle\network\admin. The following is my tnsnames.ora:
   

   EXTPROC_CONNECTION_DATA =
   (DESCRIPTION =
   (ADDRESS_LIST =
   (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = IPC)(KEY = EXTPROC0))
   )
   (CONNECT_DATA =
   (SID = PLSExtProc)
   (PRESENTATION = RO)
   )
   )

   CDSDB =
   (DESCRIPTION =
   (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = 10.10.10.24)(PORT = 1521))
   (CONNECT_DATA =
   (SERVER = DEDICATED)
   (SERVICE_NAME = CDSDB)
   )
   )

The following I didn't do it as it works fine after doing the above steps:

If it doesn’t work you can always try to add the following in the registry:

1. Add a registry key “ORACLE� under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE
2. Create a String value named ORACLE_HOME and set it to the oracle directory created in step 2

REFRENCES