Oralytics

Python-Connecting to multiple Oracle Autonomous DBs in one program

Posted on January 28, 2020 Updated on January 21, 2020

More and more people are using the FREE Oracle Autonomous Database for building new new applications, or are migrating to it.

I’ve previously written about connecting to an Oracle Database using Python. Check out that post for details of how to setup Oracle Client and the Oracle Python library cx_Oracle.

In thatblog post I gave examples of connecting to an Oracle Database using the HostName (or IP address), the Service Name or the SID.

But with the Autonomous Oracle Database things are a little bit different. With the Autonomous Oracle Database (ADW or ATP) you will need to use an Oracle Wallet file. This file contains some of the connection details, but you don’t have access to ServiceName/SID, HostName, etc.  Instead you have the name of the Autonomous Database. The Wallet is used to create a secure connection to the Autonomous Database.

You can download the Wallet file from the Database console on Oracle Cloud.

Most people end up working with multiple database. Sometimes these can be combined into one TNSNAMES file. This can make things simple and easy. To use the download TNSNAME file you will need to set the TNS_ADMIN environment variable. This will allow Python and cx_Oracle library to automatically pick up this file and you can connect to the ATP/ADW Database.

But most people don’t work with just a single database or use a single TNSNAMES file. In most cases you need to switch between different database connections and hence need to use multiple TNSNAMES files.

The question is how can you switch between ATP/ADW Database using different TNSNAMES files while inside one Python program?

Use the os.environ setting in Python. This allows you to reassign the TNS_ADMIN environment variable to point to a new directory containing the TNSNAMES file. This is a temporary assignment and over rides the TNS_ADMIN environment variable.

For example,

import cx_Oracle
import os

os.environ['TNS_ADMIN'] = "/Users/brendan.tierney/Dropbox/wallet_ATP"

p_username = ''p_password = ''p_service = 'atp_high'
con = cx_Oracle.connect(p_username, p_password, p_service)

print(con)
print(con.version)
con.close()

I can now easily switch to another ATP/ADW Database, in the same Python program, by changing the value of os.environ and opening a new connection.

import cx_Oracle
import os

os.environ['TNS_ADMIN'] = "/Users/brendan.tierney/Dropbox/wallet_ATP"
p_username = ''
p_password = ''
p_service = 'atp_high'
con1 = cx_Oracle.connect(p_username, p_password, p_service)
...
con1.close()

...
os.environ['TNS_ADMIN'] = "/Users/brendan.tierney/Dropbox/wallet_ADW2"
p_username = ''
p_password = ''
p_service = 'ADW2_high'
con2 = cx_Oracle.connect(p_username, p_password, p_service)
...
con2.close()

As mentioned previously the setting and resetting of TNS_ADMIN using os.environ, is only temporary, and when your Python program exists or completes the original value for this environment variable will remain.