Simple Oracle Document Access (SODA)

Overview

Oracle Database Simple Oracle Document Access (SODA) allows documents to be inserted, queried, and retrieved from Oracle Database using a set of NoSQL-style cx_Oracle methods. Documents are generally JSON data but they can be any data at all (including video, images, sounds, or other binary content). Documents can be fetched from the database by key lookup or by using query-by-example (QBE) pattern-matching.

SODA uses a SQL schema to store documents but you do not need to know SQL or how the documents are stored. However, access via SQL does allow use of advanced Oracle Database functionality such as analytics for reporting.

Oracle SODA implementations are also available in Node.js, Java, PL/SQL, Oracle Call Interface and via REST.

For general information on SODA, see the SODA home page and the Oracle Database Introduction to Simple Oracle Document Access (SODA) manual.

For specified requirements see the cx_Oracle SODA requirements.

cx_Oracle uses the following objects for SODA:

  • SODA Database Object: The top level object for cx_Oracle SODA operations. This is acquired from an Oracle Database connection. A ‘SODA database’ is an abstraction, allowing access to SODA collections in that ‘SODA database’, which then allow access to documents in those collections. A SODA database is analogous to an Oracle Database user or schema, a collection is analogous to a table, and a document is analogous to a table row with one column for a unique document key, a column for the document content, and other columns for various document attributes.
  • SODA Collection Object: Represents a collection of SODA documents. By default, collections allow JSON documents to be stored. This is recommended for most SODA users. However optional metadata can set various details about a collection, such as its database storage, whether it should track version and time stamp document components, how such components are generated, and what document types are supported. By default, the name of the Oracle Database table storing a collection is the same as the collection name. Note: do not use SQL to drop the database table, since SODA metadata will not be correctly removed. Use the SodaCollection.drop() method instead.
  • SODA Document Object: Represents a document. Typically the document content will be JSON. The document has properties including the content, a key, timestamps, and the media type. By default, document keys are automatically generated. See SODA Document objects for the forms of SodaDoc.
  • SODA Document Cursor: A cursor object representing the result of the SodaOperation.getCursor() method from a SodaCollection.find() operation. It can be iterated over to access each SodaDoc.
  • SODA Operation Object: An internal object used with SodaCollection.find() to perform read and write operations on documents. Chained methods set properties on a SodaOperation object which is then used by a terminal method to find, count, replace, or remove documents. This is an internal object that should not be directly accessed.

SODA Examples

Creating and adding documents to a collection can be done as follows:

soda = connection.getSodaDatabase()

# create a new SODA collection; this will open an existing collection, if
# the name is already in use
collection = soda.createCollection("mycollection")

# insert a document into the collection; for the common case of a JSON
# document, the content can be a simple Python dictionary which will
# internally be converted to a JSON document
content = {'name': 'Matilda', 'address': {'city': 'Melbourne'}}
returnedDoc = collection.insertOneAndGet(content)
key = returnedDoc.key
print('The key of the new SODA document is: ', key)

By default, a system generated key is created when documents are inserted. With a known key, you can retrieve a document:

# this will return a dictionary (as was inserted in the previous code)
content = collection.find().key(key).getOne().getContent()
print(content)

You can also search for documents using query-by-example syntax:

# Find all documents with names like 'Ma%'
print("Names matching 'Ma%'")
qbe = {'name': {'$like': 'Ma%'}}
for doc in collection.find().filter(qbe).getDocuments():
    content = doc.getContent()
    print(content["name"])

See the samples directory for runnable SODA examples.

Committing SODA Work

The general recommendation for SODA applications is to turn on autocommit globally:

connection.autocommit = True

If your SODA document write operations are mostly independent of each other, this removes the overhead of application transaction management and the need for explicit Connection.commit() calls.

When deciding how to commit transactions, beware of transactional consistency and performance requirements. If you are using individual SODA calls to insert or update a large number of documents with individual calls, you should turn autocommit off and issue a single, explicit commit() after all documents have been processed. Also consider using SodaCollection.insertMany() or SodaCollection.insertManyAndGet() which have performance benefits.

If you are not autocommitting, and one of the SODA operations in your transaction fails, then previous uncommitted operations will not be rolled back. Your application should explicitly roll back the transaction with Connection.rollback() to prevent any later commits from committing a partial transaction.

Note:

  • SODA DDL operations do not commit an open transaction the way that SQL always does for DDL statements.
  • When autocommit is True, most SODA methods will issue a commit before successful return.
  • SODA provides optimistic locking, see SodaOperation.version().
  • When mixing SODA and relational access, any commit or rollback on the connection will affect all work.