You spend the next hour in a state of existential dread, trying different versions of the driver. Do you need the 32-bit driver or the 64-bit driver? (Spoiler: Your OS is 64-bit, but Excel is 32-bit, so you need the 32-bit driver—good luck finding that in the documentation.)
You watch as the driver cleverly rewrites your lazy SELECT * query into an optimized stream. You see it catch a potential memory leak and patch it silently. You witness it negotiate encryption (thank you, modern security standards) so that your CEO’s salary data isn’t broadcast in plain text across the office Wi-Fi. driver odbc oracle