64 bit Office OleDB drivers are finally available

Just a quick blog to let folks know that Microsoft have recently released 64 bit MS Office drivers at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=C06B8369-60DD-4B64-A44B-84B371EDE16D&displaylang=en

These are the Microsoft Office 2010 drivers and can be used for accessing Excel and Access files from within your .Net or SSIS script tasks when they are running in 64 bit mode.

Note that the instructions from the link above refer to accessing Excel 2010. If you need to access an earlier version of Excel try using "Excel 12.0" in your extended properties.

I have implemented these drivers on my SSIS server, and can now successfully run my SSIS packages in 64 bit mode and they happily access my Excel files.

I haven't done any detailed benchmarks but initial comparisons between the same package running in 32 bit mode and 64 bit mode show some very good performance improvements.