How do I access an Oracle db without installing Oracle's client and cx_Oracle?

Question

I have two RHEL servers running Python 2.4 and 2.6 separately. There is an Oracle database on the other server I need to access.

I was trying to install cx_oracle on my RHEL server but found out that the Oracle client must be installed first.

The problem is, I don’t have permission to install Oracle's client on both RHEL servers. On the same servers, a Perl program can connect to the Oracle db using:

DBI->connect("dbi:Oracle:host=myhost.prod.com;sid=prddb",'username','password')

Can Python do the same without installing cx_oracle and the Oracle client? Or are there any suggestions about how to write a module myself to do the same thing?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

An excerpt from https://forum.omz-software.com/topic/184/oracle-database:

There's no pure python client for Oracle and likely never will be. Even wonderful third-party toolsets like SQLalchemy still rely on cx_Oracle underneath to do the actual communication to the Oracle database servers.

—also, deciding by Google, the answer is no: there do not seem to be any pure Python Oracle clients in existence as of today.

Answer 2

Usually, all you need are the libraries, which don't necessarily require sudo rights. Extract them to a place the software will be able to read from and set the following environment variables accordingly:

ORACLE_HOME=path/to/where/you/extracted/libs
TNS_ADMIN=path/to/tnsnames.ora

I have had best luck skipping tnsnames, and just specifying the host, port, etc in the connection, but it's quite possible you'll need it for cx_oracle...I don't remember from when I used it ages ago.