cx_Oracle: How do I iterate over a result set?

Question

There are several ways to iterate over a result set. What are the tradeoff of each?

Answer 1

The canonical way is to use the built-in cursor iterator.

curs.execute('select * from people') for row in curs:     print row 

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You can use fetchall() to get all rows at once.

for row in curs.fetchall():     print row 

It can be convenient to use this to create a Python list containing the values returned:

curs.execute('select first_name from people') names = [row[0] for row in curs.fetchall()] 

This can be useful for smaller result sets, but can have bad side effects if the result set is large.

• You have to wait for the entire result set to be returned to your client process.

• You may eat up a lot of memory in your client to hold the built-up list.

• It may take a while for Python to construct and deconstruct the list which you are going to immediately discard anyways.

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If you know there's a single row being returned in the result set you can call fetchone() to get the single row.

curs.execute('select max(x) from t') maxValue = curs.fetchone()[0] 

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Finally, you can loop over the result set fetching one row at a time. In general, there's no particular advantage in doing this over using the iterator.

row = curs.fetchone() while row:     print row     row = curs.fetchone() 

Answer 2

My preferred way is the cursor iterator, but setting first the arraysize property of the cursor.

curs.execute('select * from people') curs.arraysize = 256 for row in curs:     print row 

In this example, cx_Oracle will fetch rows from Oracle 256 rows at a time, reducing the number of network round trips that need to be performed