Connection to oracle database (odbc): invalid username/password; logon denied

I would like to connect to an oracle database using the R package odbc.

The following gives an error:

host <- 'something'
port <- 1523
svc <- "this"
pass <- '***'
user <- 'me'

con <- odbc::dbConnect(DBI::dbDriver("Oracle"), 
                       UID=user, 
                       PWD=pass,
                       dbname = svc)
ORA-01017: invalid username/password; logon denied

The full version does the same:

connect.string <- paste(
        "(DESCRIPTION=",
        "(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=tcp)(HOST=", host, ")(PORT=", port, "))",
        "(CONNECT_DATA=(SERVICE_NAME=", svc, ")))", sep = "")

con <- odbc::dbConnect(DBI::dbDriver("Oracle"), 
                       UID=user, 
                       PWD=pass,
                       dbname = connect.string)
ORA-01017: invalid username/password; logon denied

Here is the info from dbDriver:

DBI::dbDriver("Oracle")
Driver name:             Oracle (OCI) 
Driver version:          1.3-1 
Client version:          12.2.0.1.0 
Connections processed:   0 
Open connections:        0 
Interruptible:           FALSE 
Unicode data as utf8:    TRUE 
Oracle type attributes:  FALSE

But when I use RODBC with the same information, it all works fine:

connect.string2 <- paste0("Driver={Oracle in OraClient12Home1};Dbq=",svc,";Uid=",user,";Pwd=",pass,";")
con <-RODBC::odbcDriverConnect(connect.string2)
RODBC::sqlTables(con, tableType = "TABLE") # looks perfect

I would really like to keep working with odbc because I have a package that is build on it (connection to several different databases, and odbc always worked fine so far). Why is it not working this time?

Solution

I don't know why exactly the individual-arguments method doesn't work, but you can always use your connection string with DBI/odbc as well. From https://github.com/r-dbi/odbc#connection-strings,

Alternatively you can pass a complete connection string as the .connection_string argument. The Connection Strings Reference is a useful resource that has example connection strings for a large variety of databases.
library(DBI)
con <- dbConnect(odbc::odbc(),
  .connection_string = "Driver={PostgreSQL Driver};Uid=postgres;Pwd=password;Host=localhost;Port=5432;Database=test_db;")

From this, I suspect you can do:

connect.string2 <- paste0("Driver={Oracle in OraClient12Home1};Dbq=",svc,";Uid=",user,";Pwd=",pass,";")
con <- odbc::dbConnect(DBI::dbDriver("Oracle"),
                       .connection_string = connect.string2)