[DB-SIG] cx_Oracle and BFILE's

[Matthew Cahn]

I have an application which uses Oracle (8i and 9i, but eventually 
10g).  It uses DCOracle2, partly for historical reasons, but also 
because DCOracle2 handles BFILE's.  (BFILE's are like BLOB's, but the 
data is stored outside the tablespace.)

Apparently cx_Oracle doesn't handle BFILE's:
 
 >>> cur.execute('select image from observation')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
cx_Oracle.NotSupportedError: Variable_TypeByOracleDataType: unhandled 
data type 114

Version: cx_Oracle-4.1-win32-9i-py23.exe

I'd like to switch from the unsupported DCOracle2 to cx_Oracle.  BFILE's 
are important to the application because we'll have a couple of 
terrabytes of images and I don't want to make a tablespace that big.

Could anyone comment on the possibility of adding BFILE support to 
cx_Oracle, or the difficulty of doing so?

Thanks,
Matthew