When installing the OLE DB provider, the Windows Registry must modified. Typically, this is done using the self-registration capability built into the OLE DB provider. For example, you would use the Windows regsvr32 tool to do this. A standard set of registry entries are created by the provider.

In a typical connection string, one of the components is the Provider attribute. To indicate that the SQL Anywhere OLE DB provider is to be used, you specify the name of the provider. Here is a Visual Basic example:

connectString = "Provider=SAOLEDB;DSN=SQL Anywhere 16 Demo"

With ADO and/or OLE DB, there are many other ways to reference the provider by name. Here is a C++ example in which you specify not only the provider name but also the version to use.

hr = db.Open(_T("SAOLEDB.16"), &dbinit);

The provider name is looked up in the registry. If you were to examine the registry on your computer system, you would find an entry in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT for SAOLEDB.

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SAOLEDB]
@="SQL Anywhere OLE DB Provider"

It has two subkeys that contain a class identifier (Clsid) and current version (CurVer) for the provider. Here is an example.

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SAOLEDB\Clsid] 
@="{41dfe9f7-db91-11d2-8c43-006008d26a6f}" 

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\SAOLEDB\CurVer]
@="SAOLEDB.16"

There are several more similar entries. They are used to identify a specific instance of an OLE DB provider. If you look up the Clsid in the registry under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID and examine the subkeys, you see that one of the entries identifies the location of the provider DLL.

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\
{41dfe9f3-db91-11d2-8c43-006008d26a6f}\
InprocServer32]

@="c:\\sa16\\bin64\\dboledb16.dll"
"ThreadingModel"="Both"

The problem here is that the structure is very monolithic. If you were to uninstall the SQL Anywhere software from your system, the OLE DB provider registry entries would be removed from your registry and then the provider DLL would be removed from your hard drive. Any applications that depend on the provider would no longer work.

Similarly, if applications from different vendors all use the same OLE DB provider, then each installation of the same provider would overwrite the common registry settings. The version of the provider that you intended your application to work with would be supplanted by another newer (or older!) version of the provider.

The instability that could arise from this situation is undesirable. To address this issue, the SQL Anywhere OLE DB provider can be customized.