What’s New¶
cx_Oracle 6.0¶
This document contains a summary of the changes in cx_Oracle 6 compared to cx_Oracle 5.3. cx_Oracle 6.0 was released on August 14, 2017. See the release notes for complete details.
Highlights¶
- Has been re-implemented to use the new ODPI-C abstraction layer for Oracle Database. The cx_Oracle API is unchanged. The cx_Oracle design, build and linking process has improved because of ODPI-C.
- Now has Python Wheels available for install. This is made possible by the ODPI-C architecture. Windows installers and Linux RPMs are no longer produced since PyPI no longer supports them.
- Has less code in Python’s Global Interpreter Lock, giving better scalability.
- Added support for universal rowids.
- Added support for DML returning of multiple rows.
- Now associates LOB locators to LOB objects so they are not overwritten on database round trips.
Installation Changes¶
- On Linux, cx_Oracle 6 no longer uses instant client RPMs automatically. You must set LD_LIBRARY_PATH or use ldconfig to locate the Oracle Client library.
- On platforms other than Windows, if ORACLE_HOME is set (in a database or full client installation), remove requirement to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH in order to locate the Oracle Client library (issue 20).
Connection Management Enhancements¶
- Prevent closing the connection when there are any open statements or LOBs and add new error “DPI-1054: connection cannot be closed when open statements or LOBs exist” when this situation is detected; this is needed to prevent crashes under certain conditions when statements or LOBs are being acted upon while at the same time (in another thread) a connection is being closed; it also prevents leaks of statements and LOBs when a connection is returned to a session pool.
- Added attribute
SessionPool.stmtcachesize
to support getting and setting the default statement cache size for connections in the pool.- Added attribute
Connection.dbop
to support setting the database operation that is to be monitored.- Added attribute
Connection.handle
to facilitate testing the creation of a connection using a OCI service context handle.- Added parameters tag and matchanytag to the
cx_Oracle.connect()
andSessionPool.acquire()
methods and added parameters tag and retag to theSessionPool.release()
method in order to support session tagging.- Added parameter edition to the
cx_Oracle.SessionPool()
method.- Added parameters region, sharding_key and super_sharding_key to the
cx_Oracle.makedsn()
method to support connecting to a sharded database (new in Oracle Database 12.2).- Removed requirement that encoding and nencoding both be specified when creating a connection or session pool. The missing value is set to its default value if one of the values is set and the other is not (issue 36).
- Permit use of both string and unicode for Python 2.7 for creating session pools and for changing passwords (issue 23).
Data Type and Data Handling Enhancements¶
- Added attributes
Variable.actualElements
andVariable.values
to variables.- Added support for smallint and float data types in Oracle objects, as requested (issue 4).
- Added support for getting/setting attributes of objects or element values in collections that contain LOBs, BINARY_FLOAT values, BINARY_DOUBLE values and NCHAR and NVARCHAR2 values. The error message for any types that are not supported has been improved as well.
- An exception is no longer raised when a collection is empty for methods
Object.first()
andObject.last()
. Instead, the value None is returned to be consistent with the methodsObject.next()
andObject.prev()
.- Removed requirement for specifying a maximum size when fetching LONG or LONG raw columns. This also allows CLOB, NCLOB, BLOB and BFILE columns to be fetched as strings or bytes without needing to specify a maximum size. The method
Cursor.setoutputsize()
no longer does anything, since ODPI-C automatically manages buffer sizes of LONG and LONG RAW columns.- Enable temporary LOB caching in order to avoid disk I/O as suggested (issue 10).
Error Handling Enhancements¶
- Provide improved error message when OCI environment cannot be created, such as when the oraaccess.xml file cannot be processed properly.
- Define exception classes on the connection object in addition to at module scope in order to simplify error handling in multi-connection environments, as specified in the Python DB API.
Test Enhancements¶
- Reworked test suite and samples so that they are independent of each other and so that the SQL scripts used to create/drop schemas are easily adjusted to use different schema names, if desired.
- Updated DB API test suite stub to support Python 3.
Removals¶
- Dropped deprecated parameter twophase from the
cx_Oracle.connect()
method. Applications should set theConnection.internal_name
andConnection.external_name
attributes instead to a value appropriate to the application.- Dropped deprecated parameters action, module and clientinfo from the
cx_Oracle.connect()
method. The appcontext parameter should be used instead as shown in this sample.- Dropped deprecated attribute numbersAsString from cursor objects. Use an output type handler instead as shown in this sample.
- Dropped deprecated attributes cqqos and rowids from subscription objects. Use the qos attribute instead as shown in this sample.
- Dropped deprecated parameters cqqos and rowids from the
Connection.subscribe()
method. Use the qos parameter instead as shown in this sample.