support within Python 2.x; move away from character semantics which Oracle is
deprecating anyway to byte semantics which should hopefully eliminate the
problem with a backend character set of UTF-8.
shared without having to specify such; remove references to methods that get
the attributes and methods dynamically since these are deprecated in Python 2.6
and above. Thanks to Amaury Forgeot d'Arc for the initial patch.
NATIVE_FLOAT to allow specification of a variable of that specific type where
desired. Thanks to D.R. Boxhoorn for pointing out the fact that this was not
working properly when the arraysize was anything other than 1.