[cx-oracle-users] How to read 16-digit numbers?

[Guido v. R. <gu...@el...>]

A certain table in our Oracle database contains 16-digit integers.
These are a bit of a pain to get right at the best of times, but "set
numformat 9999999999999999" makes it work in SQL*Plus.  Now my colleague
is complaining that when using cx_Oracle, the values come back with the
lower digit(s?) truncated, as if they have somehow been converted to a
floating point type and back that doesn't have enough bits.  This seems
strange to me, since an IEEE float *does* have enough bits for the
values, and Python has no trouble with these at all.  What are we
missing?  (A sample value is 1234567800000001.)

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido)