[cx-oracle-users] Using cx_Oracle 6.0rc1 on Windows

[Walter D. <wa...@li...>]

Hello all!

We're trying to use the new cx_Oracle 6.0 on Windows and have the 
following problem:

    (default) C:\>pip install --no-cache-dir cx_Oracle==6.0rc1
    Collecting cx_Oracle==6.0rc1
      Downloading cx_Oracle-6.0rc1-cp36-cp36m-win_amd64.whl (210kB)
        100% 
|████████████████████████████████| 
215kB 2.7MB/s
    Installing collected packages: cx-Oracle
    Successfully installed cx-Oracle-6.0rc1

    (default) C:\>python
    Python 3.6.0 (v3.6.0:41df79263a11, Dec 23 2016, 08:06:12) [MSC 
v.1900 64 bit (AMD64)] on win32
    Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more 
information.
   >>> import cx_Oracle
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
    UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xe4 in position 
66: invalid continuation byte
   >>>

This is on Windows 10 Home. The Python version is the one that you get 
when you install Visual Studio 2017 with the Python development 
workload. The Oracle version is an Oracle 11 XE. ORACLE_HOME points to 
c:\oraclexe\app\oracle\product\11.2.0\server

The Oracle installation itself seems to be working:

    (default) C:\>sqlplus

    SQL*Plus: Release 11.2.0.2.0 Production on Do Jun 29 11:49:53 2017

    Copyright (c) 1982, 2010, Oracle.  All rights reserved.

    Enter user-name: sys/pwd as sysdba

    Connected to:
    Oracle Database 11g Express Edition Release 11.2.0.2.0 - Production

    SQL> exit
    Disconnected from Oracle Database 11g Express Edition Release 
11.2.0.2.0 - Production

This seems to be a problem related to encoding, but changing NLS_LANG 
from GERMAN_GERMANY.AL32UTF8 to GERMAN_GERMANY.WE8IOS8859P1 doesn't 
change anything.

Any help with getting cx_Oracle running would be appreciated.

Servus,
    Walter