Installation guide

6. mxODBC Connection Objects

Cursors also support the context manager API, so the above could be simplified

even more to:

with connection:

with connection.cursor() as cursor:

cursor.execute('INSERT INTO table VALUES (?, ?)', (1, 2))

… other tasks …

6.6 Unicode/ANSI Connections

Starting with mxODBC 3.1, it is possible to tell the ODBC driver manager whether

to use the Unicode ODBC interface of a supporting ODBC driver or the ANSI (8-

bit string) ODBC interface at connection time.

6.6.1 Unicode ODBC Interface

If the ODBC driver supports the ODBC Unicode interface and you select the

Unicode interface by using a Unicode string as connection parameter, the ODBC

manager will subsequently convert all ANSI-parameters to Unicode and then call

the Unicode APIs of the ODBC driver. Unicode parameters are passed through as-

is to the ODBC driver.

For ODBC drivers that natively support the ODBC Unicode interface, connecting

using a Unicode connection string and subsequently using Unicode parameters

for all execution and catalog methods may result in better performance or

improved compatibility.

Example:

# Use the Unicode ODBC API of the driver by using a Unicode connection

# string

db = mx.ODBC.Windows.DriverConnect(u'DSN=mydb;UID=uid;PWD=pwd')

6.6.2 ANSI ODBC Interface

If the ODBC driver does not support the ODBC Unicode interface, or you connect

using an ANSI (8-bit string), the ODBC driver manager will subsequently convert

all Unicode parameters to the connection's ANSI code page before calling the

ANSI API on the ODBC driver. ANSI parameters are passed through as-is to the

ODBC driver.

For ODBC drivers that do not support the ODBC Unicode interface, connecting

using an ANSI connection string and subsequently using ANSI parameters for all

execution and catalog methods may result in better performance or improved

compatibility.

Example:

# Use the ANSI ODBC API of the driver by using an 8-bit connection