Before diving into the download process, it’s critical to understand what this driver does and, equally important, what it is not.

Once on this official page:

Installation completed, but driver list is empty. Possible solutions:

Common connection strings using this driver appear as: Driver=SQL Server Native Client 10.0;Server=myServer\instance;Database=myDB;Trusted_Connection=yes;

Recent user reports indicate significant performance degradation when running this driver on Windows 11 , with some applications becoming "unacceptably slow" after OS updates.

You may need to download and install the Microsoft SQL Server Native Client 10.0 ODBC driver in the following scenarios: