What is cx_Oracle? cx_Oracle is a Python extension module that enables access to Oracle Database for Python 3.x and 2.x and conforms to the Python database API 2.0 specifications with a number of enhancements. Where do I get it? https://oracle.github.io/python-cx_Oracle The easiest method to install cx_Oracle 6.0 is via pip as in python -m pip install cx_Oracle --upgrade What's new since 5.3? This is the first production release of version 6.0. The complete release notes can be found here: http://cx-oracle.readthe docs.io/en/latest/releasenotes.html#version-6-0-august-2017. A summary of the changes compared to version 5.3 is found below: *Highlighted Enhancements* - Has been re-implemented to use the new ODPI-C ( https://oracle.github.io/odpi) 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 (https://github.com/oracle/odp i/issues/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 and SessionPool.acquire methods and added parameters tag and retag to the SessionPool.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 ( https://github.com/oracle/python-cx_Oracle/issues/36). - Permit use of both string and unicode for Python 2.7 for creating session pools and for changing passwords (https://github.com/oracle/pyt hon-cx_Oracle/issues/23). *Data Type and Data Handling Enhancements* - Added attributes Variable.actualElements and Variable.values to variables. - Added support for smallint and float data types in Oracle objects, as requested (https://github.com/oracle/python-cx_Oracle/issues/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() and Object.last(). Instead, the value None is returned to be consistent with the methods Object.next() and 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 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 ( https://github.com/oracle/odpi/issues/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 the Connection.internal_name and Connection.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. - Dropped deprecated attribute numbersAsString from cursor objects. Use an output type handler instead. - Dropped deprecated attributes cqqos and rowids from subscription objects. Use the qos attribute instead. - Dropped deprecated parameters cqqos and rowids from the Connection.subscribe() method. Use the qos parameter instead.