Today I finished a white paper on configuring Oracle drivers for Microsoft BI applications (like Integration Services, Analysis Services and Reporting Services).  I've configured these environments quite often, but like so many things my brain has a hard time remembering all the nuances every time.

So to help myself--and hopefully some others as well--I put all the basics down on paper.  Beyond being a "white paper", this one has complete configuration instructions (with screen shots) to install, configure and test Oracle drivers in a 64-bit environment.  

Please feel free to download the full document as a PDF.  Hope this helps!

From the white-paper intro:

Summary: This white paper describes the procedures needed to configure Oracle database drivers for use in Microsoft BI services (SSIS, SSRS, SSAS and BIDS) in a 64-bit Windows Server 2008 R2 environment. 

This article covers the selection and configuration of Oracle database drivers, including detailed configuration procedures.

Specific coverage is given to configuration requirements for scenarios where BIDS is installed and used on 64-bit SSIS servers.

This document includes configuration procedures for both the 64-bit and 32-bit versions of the Oracle Provider for OLEDB and the Microsoft Connector for Oracle by Attunity.

While the primary target for this document is SQL Server 2008 R2, the techniques and discussion also apply to SQL Server 2008 and SQL Server 2005 product versions.

Server core is a lightweight, capable edition of Windows Server 2008.  A lot of baggage isn't there, making more resources available for network applications, while reducing the attack surface area.

 Some GUI tools are still available, but one of them that's not is a facility to manage the Windows Update process on the server console.  Arguably a sophisticated infrastructure wouldn't need this, and could use WSUS instead.  However there are those servers that need some administrative looking-after.

 A script to manually drive the windows update process for critical updates is available from Microsoft--follow this link.

 The script is dead easy to use, just copy to a server core machine and run using cscript.