.. _whatsnew: ********** What's New ********** .. _whatsnew60: 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 :ref:`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 :attr:`SessionPool.stmtcachesize` to support getting and setting the default statement cache size for connections in the pool. - Added attribute :attr:`Connection.dbop` to support setting the database operation that is to be monitored. - Added attribute :attr:`Connection.handle` to facilitate testing the creation of a connection using a OCI service context handle. - Added parameters tag and matchanytag to the :meth:`cx_Oracle.connect` and :meth:`SessionPool.acquire` methods and added parameters tag and retag to the :meth:`SessionPool.release` method in order to support session tagging. - Added parameter edition to the :meth:`cx_Oracle.SessionPool` method. - Added parameters region, sharding_key and super_sharding_key to the :meth:`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 :attr:`Variable.actualElements` and :attr:`Variable.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 :meth:`Object.first()` and :meth:`Object.last()`. Instead, the value None is returned to be consistent with the methods :meth:`Object.next()` and :meth:`Object.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 :meth:`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 :meth:`cx_Oracle.connect` method. Applications should set the :attr:`Connection.internal_name` and :attr:`Connection.external_name` attributes instead to a value appropriate to the application. - Dropped deprecated parameters action, module and clientinfo from the :meth:`cx_Oracle.connect` method. The appcontext parameter should be used instead as shown in this `sample `__. - Dropped deprecated attribute numbersAsString from :ref:`cursor objects `. Use an output type handler instead as shown in this `sample `__. - Dropped deprecated attributes cqqos and rowids from :ref:`subscription objects `. Use the qos attribute instead as shown in this `sample `__. - Dropped deprecated parameters cqqos and rowids from the :meth:`Connection.subscribe()` method. Use the qos parameter instead as shown in this `sample `__.