[DB-SIG] return value of fetchone (DBAPI 2.0)

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Stefan Fleiter wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I had a discussion by private mail with Stuart Bishop about the
> return value of fetchone() of the DBAPI 2.0.
> 
> In his UnitTest (http://zen.freezope.org/Software/DBAPI20TestSuite/)
> it is assumed, that
>     'cursor.fetchall should return an empty list if '
>     'a select query returns no rows'.
> 
> In http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0249.html,
> you can read in the paragraph specifying fetchone():
>     An Error (or subclass) exception is raised if the previous
>         call to executeXXX() did not produce any result set or no
>         call was issued yet.
> 
> Mr. Bishop writes:
>  > I'm pretty certain the existing implementation is correct. There
>  > is a difference between returning no result set and an empty one.
>  > So .fetchall() after .execute('update ...') may raise an exception,
>  > but .fetchall() after .execute('select * from foo where 0 = 1')
>  > returns an empty list.
> 
> I think the pep does not state this and should really be more clear 
> regarding this issue.
> 
> One thing that comes to my mind now is, that with Oracle and the 
> "returning clause" almost every statement, including updates can produce 
> a result.
> 
> Can someone please clarify on this?

Not sure what you want clarified. Stuart is correct and the
db-api spec. is clear on this as well.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
eGenix.com

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