Question

Found an example using cx_Oracle, this example shows all the information of Cursor.description.

import cx_Oracle
from pprint import pprint

connection = cx_Oracle.Connection("%s/%s@%s" % (dbuser, dbpasswd, oracle_sid))
cursor = cx_Oracle.Cursor(connection)
sql = "SELECT * FROM your_table"
cursor.execute(sql)
data = cursor.fetchall()
print "(name, type_code, display_size, internal_size, precision, scale, null_ok)"
pprint(cursor.description)
pprint(data)
cursor.close()
connection.close()

What I wanted to see was the list of Cursor.description[0](name), so I changed the code:

import cx_Oracle
import pprint

connection = cx_Oracle.Connection("%s/%s@%s" % (dbuser, dbpasswd, oracle_sid))
cursor = cx_Oracle.Cursor(connection)
sql = "SELECT * FROM your_table"
cursor.execute(sql)
data = cursor.fetchall()
col_names = []
for i in range(0, len(cursor.description)):
    col_names.append(cursor.description[i][0])
pp = pprint.PrettyPrinter(width=1024)
pp.pprint(col_names)
pp.pprint(data)
cursor.close()
connection.close()

I think there will be better ways to print out the names of columns. Please get me alternatives to the Python beginner. 🙂

Answer 1

The SQLAlchemy source code is a good starting point for robust methods of database introspection. Here is how SQLAlchemy reflects table names from Oracle:

SELECT table_name FROM all_tables
WHERE nvl(tablespace_name, 'no tablespace') NOT IN ('SYSTEM', 'SYSAUX')
AND OWNER = :owner
AND IOT_NAME IS NULL