We have received a number of cases in support recently where a Geodatabase_SDE direct connection to an enterprise Geodatabase sitting on SQL Server has failed due to the inability to load the client libraries. Once we have determined that it isn't related to a 32 bit vs 64 bit issue the problem manifests as either the error message
"fme.exe - System Error The program can't start because sdemssqlsrvr102.dll is
missing from your computer. Try reinstalling the program to fix this problem."
or
"Could not open the Enterprise Geodatabase. The error number from ArcObjects is: '-2147155644'. The error message from ArcObjects is: {Cannot connect to database because the database client software failed to load. Be sure the database client software is installed and configured correctly.} "
In all cases these workspaces also contained a reader/writer that was accessing some other Microsoft format - e.g. Personal Geodatabase, MS SQL Server non-spatial, Excel reader etc.
It turned out that Windows uses a bunch of rules to find locations of dlls for loading. One of them is searching for the dlls in the locations found in the PATH environment variable. FME takes advantage of this to load dlls from our 'plugins' directory by prepending that directory to the path. ArcObjects was also doing this for their direct connect dlls.
However, there were incompatiblies to how we are setting the path and how ArcObjects is doing it. So we have added a fix for this into FME 2014 SP3 and FME 2015 to make them compatible.
Other workarounds we have found are to move the Geodatabase_SDE reader/writer to be the first in the Navigator pane such that it's libraries are loaded first.
Or add the location of the ArcGIS bin folder into your PATH Environment variable.
Both FME 2014 SP3 and FME 2015 are available for download from our website at http://www.safe.com/beta
If you have any further questions please feel free to contact us via our webpage at http://www.safe.com/supportrequest
Kind regards,
Robyn Rennie
FME Desktop Support Manager