The operation of FDO Provider for ArcSDE is dependent on the presence of ArcSDE 9 and a supported data source, such as Oracle 9i, in the network environment. The host machine running FDO Provider for ArcSDE must also have the required DLLs present, which are available by installing either an ArcGIS 9.1 Desktop application or the ArcSDE SDK. For example, the required DLLs are present if either ArcView®, ArcEditor®, or ArcInfo® are installed. For more information about ArcGIS 9.1 Desktop applications and the ArcSDE SDK, refer to the ESRI documentation.
Specifically, in order for FDO Provider for ArcSDE to run, three dynamically linked libraries, sde91.dll, sg91.dll, and pe91.dll, are required and you must ensure that the PATH environment variable references the local folder containing these DLLs. For example, in Microsoft Windows, if ArcGIS 9.1 Desktop is installed to C:\Program Files\ArcGIS, then the required ArcSDE binaries are located at C:\Program Files\ArcGIS\ArcSDE\bin. Similarly, if the ArcSDE SDK is installed to the default location, then the required ArcSDE binaries are located at C:\ArcGis\ArcSDE\bin. The absence of this configuration may cause the following exception message "The ArcSDE runtime was not found.".