calling Oracle functions

[Anthony Tuininga]

On Fri, 2002-09-13 at 10:22, Дамјан Г. wrote:
> 
> > Oracle differentiates between functions and procedures so you must
> > identify that you are calling a function, not a procedure. The DB API
> > does not allow for this, so you must use an anonymous PL/SQL block and
> > some non DB API code. The way to do this is as follows:
> 
> ok. I also tried that, I mean a PL/SQL block... but
> 
> > Replace the data types as appropriate.
> 
> > v_Vars = v_Cursor.setinputsizes(p_Result = cx_Oracle.NUMBER)
> 
> didn't know about this :)) thanks.

You're welcome.

> ...
> > If anyone has suggestions about how to improve this, fire away... :-)
> 
> yes, put it in the documentation. 
> Actually is there any documentation about cx_Oracle, past the README
> file?

Bits and pieces in a variety of places. The assumption (to date) has
been that the DB API is sufficient for almost everything and that you
really shouldn't use extensions.... :-) However, over the couple of
years that I have been using the DB API I have discovered a fair number
of deficiencies with respect to Oracle, in particular when it comes to
performance and quirks of Oracle. It hasn't been a problem for me since
I wrote cx_Oracle, but it has been my desire to consolidate the DB API
document with descriptions of the extensions used by cx_Oracle -- I hope
to do something about this in the next month or so.

> Now a simpler question:
> 	is it possible to specify the data source name directly not through
> 	the alias defined in tnsnames.ora. In perl DBD I can specify a
> 	connection string like cs = "dbi:Oracle:host=1.10.100.200;sid=TEST"?

cx_Oracle is passing the string directly to Oracle, so whatever it
accepts, cx_Oracle will accept. Specifically, you can take the entire
string that is in your tnsnames.ora file and pass it directly as in

v_TNS =
(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS_LIST=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(HOST=opus)(PORT=1521)))(CONNECT_DATA=(SID=DEV)))

v_Connection = cx_Oracle.connect("user", "pw", v_TNS)

and that works just fine. Does that answer your question?

-- 
Anthony Tuininga
anthony at computronix.com
 
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