We are currently doing a research to determine the impact of upgrading our POSSE applications from using cx_Oracle version 5.1.2 to 7.1.1 with Python version 2.7.1 and Oracle version 11.2.0.4 & 12.1.0.2. We have determined the following:

1. When a connection is initialized from a PowerBuilder application and passed to cx_Oracle connection using a handle, cx_Oracle raises the following error message when trying to fetch data from the database using the connection cursor. DatabaseError: ORA-00911: invalid character
2. The default character set used by the PowerBuilder application is Unicode.
3. The cx_Oracle encoding character set for the connection initialized from the PowerBuilder application is U.
4. Setting the PowerBuilder application NLS character set to Local, resolves the issue.

Do you mind giving us a quick brain dump of why cx_Oracle version 7.1.1 acts as described above?

Note that we are using PowerBuilder version 11.2.

Thank You So Much,
Hussein Hussein
Computronix Canada.