Re: [IBMiOSS] ibm_db_dbi UnicodeDecodeError

On Tue, Dec 3, 2019 at 12:17 PM Craig Richards <craig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm certainly open to the idea of contributing to the project, but I might
need a little support/mentoring to do it...

I'm in a similar boat, maybe a little further along than yours, but
still a dinghy. ;)

I did a little poking around in ibm_db_dbi.py and discovered there's a
`columns` method on the connection object. It lets you specify a
schema and a table and gives you a list of dictionaries, one
dictionary per column in the table. You could optionally give it a
third argument which is a sequence of desired column names, and it
will just give you back the info for those columns.

This might be another alternative within ibm_db_dbi (should be similar
to querying SYSCOLUMNS, but using just Python and no SQL). For all I
know, this has the same underlying mechanism (within ibm_db) as
cursor.description, and may be subject to the same limitations (and
errors), but it's worth experimenting with.

If you try it out, report what you get. It works fine for me, but
since my system is U.S. English, with all column names composed
entirely of "safe ASCII" characters, that's not saying much.

John Y.