programmatically determine Oracle Home installed version?

Question

I need to determine from a program what version of Oracle is installed in each of the Oracle Homes on a server. As there may not be any databases created in the Home yet, I need to be able to do this outside of the database (i.e., without connecting to the database). Also, it would be highly preferable to be able to do this from a remote program.

This is from a windows program running .Net (C#, if that matters).

I am currently reading remote registry keys (using this technique: How to Read Remote Registry Keys?), to find all of the Oracle Homes according to this method. This works fine, however, I have looked around those keys and do not see any information on the exact version/release.

The name of an Oracle Home itself is of course 1) not a reliable indicator and 2) does not have the exact version/release (for instance "10.2.0.4.0"). Basically I am looking for a way to figure out what the Oracle Universal Installer tells you in the Installed Products button.

Answer 1

Search for file oci.dll in PATH, this is one of the major files of an Oracle Client installation. You can read version of this file with FileVersionInfo.GetVersionInfo("oci.dll");

In order the get the Registry Hive, search for file oracle.reg in PATH (i.e. Oracle Home). This file is a simple text file containing the Registry key, for example SOFTWARE\ORACLE\KEY_OraClient11g_home1. You will find related registry values in HK_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\ORACLE\KEY_OraClient11g_home1 `