I have a couple of questions regarding to ODBC drivers:

1. For Oracle ODBC driver, when I go to the download page of Oracle's website, there are several different versions available for download. e.g. 8.1.7.4.0, 8.1.7.3.0, 8.1.6.4.0 etc. And it also listed for all drivers that the Oracle8 and Oracle8i ODBC Drivers are Version 3.51, Level 2 compatible drivers. So what does the version 3.51 tell us?

2. For Oracle 8.1.7, there are 5 different versions of ODBC drivers available. So are the related for 5 patches? If yes, how can we find patch info? I checked my Oracle ODBC driver, and it shows 8.01.07.00 which I believe I only have the base version of Oracle 8.1.7 w/o any patch.

3. How to use MS Oracle ODBC driver? This is very important since our product supports that driver as well but I can't use that to connect. When I add a new DSN using MS Oracle ODBC driver, in the server name field, shall I put oracle service/instance name instead?

4. Does MS Oracle ODBC Driver sit on top of Oracle ODBC dirver? i.e. does customer has to have Oracle ODBC driver in order to use MS Oracle ODBC Driver? Also, how can I find which versions of MS Oracle ODBC driver will work with which version of Oracle server?

Thanks in advance for your help!!!