The fully open source Oracle Database Python driver cx_Oracle has found a new home and has its source code repository now hosted on Oracle's GitHub, reinforcing our commitment to bring more open source projects to the platform. You can find the repository under: github.com/oracle/python-cx_Oracle. This driver is widely popular amongst Python developers, data scientists, and many other users, and it is one of the most downloaded drivers for the Oracle Database.

Along with that, the latest new version of the driver 5.3 is now available for download. This version, a long awaited release by the community, brings many new key features. For a detailed write up on those and more see Chris Jones’ blog post. Version 5.3 supports Python 2.7, 3.4 and higher and you can use cx_Oracle with Oracle 11.2, 12.1 and 12.2 client libraries, allowing connections to multiple Oracle Database versions. The driver is also represented on the PyPI Python Package Index, making installing cx_Oracle as simple as running pip install cx_Oracle.

Other key new features are:

• Direct binding to SQL objects
• PL/SQL records and collections can be bound
• Support for scrollable cursors
• Support for Advanced Queuing
• Fetch PL/SQL implicit results
• Support for Statement Caching

Find the complete list of key new features on Chris' blog about this release.

We are also very proud of the fact that Anthony Tuininga, long time contributor of cx_Oracle, has decided to join Oracle and making maintaining the driver his full-time job. Welcome aboard, Anthony!

What's Ahead: cx_Oracle 6.0

Anthony has already looked ahead to version 6, which aims to be even better. Over the past year, he'ss been working hard on ODPI-C, an open source library of C code that simplifies and standardizes the use of common Oracle Call Interface (OCI) features, such as those used by cx_Oracle. ODPI-C was recently released on the Oracle GitHub odpi repository. As you can see from the cx_Oracle source code, the master branch of cx_Oracle code has been updated to use ODPI-C. If you want to test the current state of this future release, download a bundle from GitHub and build it.