Problem with dbi, odbc module and Oracle 9.2 - suffixed "L" with number data type

[Diez B. Roggisch]

dananrg at yahoo.com wrote:

> I was messing around with the native ODBC module (I am using Python in
> a Win32 environment), e.g:
> 
> import dbi, odbc
> 
> ...and it seems to meet my needs. I'd rather use a module that comes
> natively with Python if it works (don't care about performance in this
> particular use case; just that it works).
> 
> The only issue I've had so far is retrieving data from Oracle when an
> integer has been defined like:
> 
>        number(p)    [same thing as number(p,0) evidently]
> 
> This is from a database I didn't design and can't change. Evidently
> there are new ways to declare integer data types in Oracle.
> 
> The problem is that the ODBC module suffixes an "L" to any integer
> returned that
> was defined as data type number(p). For example, an integer stored as:
> 56  will be returned as 56L. Actually, it now seems to be doing the
> same thing, at least in some cases, for number data types declared as
> number(p,s). What gives? Anyone know why this would happen?

Well, it is a legal python umber literal. Fire up your python interpreter
and do

>>> long(1)
1L

It simply says that it is a long, not an int (which means 64 rather than 32
bits of precision I think)

So - no need to worry.

Diez