NEWS

---

ROracle 1.5-1 (2025-10-27)

• Add support for sparse vectors
• Make package uploadable to CRAN
• Bug 37777349: support data longer than 32767 in bind to CLOB

ROracle 1.5-0

• Add dynamic load of Oracle client library
• Add support for vector data types This feature is only available with 23AI database, source package built with Oracle client lower than version 23 mjust be rebuilt with higher version
• Add support for PLSQL boolean types
• Fix configure.ac
• if one sees differences with precision after ROracle driver is loaded then one can set environment variable ORA_FPU_PRECISION to EXTENDED NOTE: dbWriteTable on boolean and object types fetched from DB is not supported in this version, it will be added in future version

ROracle 1.4-1

• Add support for user defined types
• bug 30087742 - Modify WriteTable() to insert into generated columns

ROracle 1.3-2

• Use ora.encoding for DML when specified
• Updated INSTALL
• One can now specify type of Oracle DBMS column using ora.type attribute in dataframe when using dbWriteTable

ROracle 1.3-1 (2016-10-26)

• Handled both upper and lower cases in ora.type, ora.parameter_mode and ora.encoding attributes.
• Support for OCIBindByName has been added for SQL and PL/SQL calls by specifying ora.parameter_name attribute and bind valiables used in SQL or PL/SQL calls must be bound by the name specified in ora.parameter_name.
• Support for PL/SQL stored procedure/function and REF cursors have been added. The OUT bind parameter must be initialized with 'NA' or 'NA' coerced to any other vector type .
• Use OCIArrayDescriptorAlloc instead of OCIDescriptorAlloc for performance improvements when Oracle client release 11.1 or higher is used to build and run ROracle.
• Removed unused variables
• Removed functions (dbSetDataMappings and dbCallProc) that will not be available in 0.3.1 DBI specifications.

ROracle 1.2-2 (2016-02-17)

• Performance improvements for fetching date, timestamp, timstamp with time zone and time stamp with local time zone.
• Atlantic Azores and America Scoresbysund timezone regions have an issue with overlap times and hence these timezones are not supported with ROracle. The issue is being investigated by Oracle. Bug #22558537 filed for this.

ROracle 1.2-1 (2015-07-31)

• ROracle on client now supports NATIVE, UTF8 and LATIN1 encoded data in query and results. Please refer to man page. ROracle works with character sets that are supported by both R and Oracle NLS on the host platform. UTF-8 encoded character sets are usually supported on many Unix-like platforms.
• bug 16017358 - Misuse of Extproc driver in embedded R can cause a segmentation fault
• enhancement 20603162 - CLOB/BLOB enhancement on ROracle. Please refer to man page regarding the following attributes: 1) Attribute Name: ora.type 2) Attribute Name: ora.encoding 3) Attribute Name: ora.maxlength 4) Attribute Name: ora.fractional_seconds_precision
• bug 15937661 - Allow mapping BLOB, CLOB, NCLOB, NCHAR, NVARCHAR2, TIME STAMP WITH TIME ZONE, TIME STAMP WITH LOCAL TIME ZONE columns correctly for dbWriteTable
• bug 16907374 - ROracle creates time stamp column for R Date with dbWriteTable
• ROracle now displays NCHAR, NVARCHAR2 and NCLOB data types defined for columns in the server using dbColumnInfo and dbGetInfo

ROracle 1.1-12 (2014-11-20)

• Add bulk_write parameter to specify number of rows to bind at a time to improve performance for dbWriteTable and DML operations.
• Date, Timestamp, Timestamp with time zone and Timestamp with local time zone data are maintained in R and Oracle's session time zone. Oracle session time zone environment variable ORA_SDTZ and R's environment variable TZ must be the same for this to work else an error is reported when operating on any of these column types.
• bug 16198839 - Allow selecting data from time stamp with time zone and time stamp with local time zone without reporting error 1805
• bug 18316008 - increases the bind limit from 4000 to 2GB for inserting data into BLOB, CLOB and 32K VARCHAR and RAW data types. Changes describe lengths to NA for all types except for CHAR, VARCHAR2, and RAW
• Fix unnecessary adjustment to UTC when converting from epoch to Oracle types and vice versa
• Performance improvements and address issue with fetch
• bug 18404532 - Fetching LOB data with an empty BLOB/CLOB (0 LENGTH) results in ORA-24801 error
• bug 18404569 - Fetch method will result in extra instructions when size exceeds bulk read limit
• bug 18908645 - Follow base::.set_row_names convention when forming data.frame objects at the C level.
• bug 16686948 - Updated ROracle document with use of ora.number argument of dbWriteTable()

ROracle 1.1-11 (2014-03-04)

• Performance improvements for RAW data type and large result sets
• Cache resultset in memory before transferring to R to avoid unnecessary alloc and free using allocVector when result exceeds bulk_read rows
• Updated INSTALL with restrictions on using Basic Lite package
• added session mode to connect as SYSDBA or external credentials NOTE: authentication using SYSDBA is only available by default in 11.2 and later releases, for earlier releases please obtain patch for bug# 7000451 in Oracle Client
• bug 17383542: Enhanced dbWritetable() & dbRemoveTable() to work on global schema.

ROracle 1.1-10 (2013-05-14)

• Oracle number columns are now fetched using SQLT_FLT data type

ROracle 1.1-9

• bug 16570993: Fix platform-porting issue for supporting datastore

ROracle 1.1-8 (2013-02-12)

• bug 16188612: Setting of OCI_LIB32 and/or OCI_LIB64 environment variables on Windows is mandatory, see INSTALL for details.

ROracle 1.1-7 (2012-12-05)

• bug 15900089: Fixed ORA-1805 error when accessing date or time stamp columns when the time zone versions on the client and server differ. ROracle returns the date, time stamp, time stamp with time zone and time stamp with local time zone in POSIXct format. Please refer to man page

ROracle 1.1-6 (2012-11-20)

• dbWriteTable now uses timestamp with time zone for POSIXct columns
• dbWriteTable now support Date columns
• Oracle interval day to second data type now maps to R's difftime

ROracle 1.1-5 (2012-09-18)

• Fixed build issues of ROracle driver with 10.2 OCI client
• Removed references to OCIArrayDescriptorAlloc() and LOB prefetch attributes to make ROracle driver compatible with 10.2 OCI client.

ROracle 1.1-4 (2012-08-08)

• Corrected buffer length issue to get Server Release Version

ROracle 1.1-3 (2012-07-21)

• add support for Oracle TimesTen In-Memory Database
• Date time (time stamp, date, time stamp with time zone and time stamp with local time zone) now uses POSIXct/POSIXlt
• RAW data type support
• BLOB and BFILE support
• Prefetching support
• soft parameter (bulk_read) to specify number of rows to fetch per execute/fetch operation from DB
• Whether to prefetch LOB data
• Break Ctrl-C handler
• Windows now uses .def file instead of binaries
• Statement caching support

ROracle 1.1-2 (2012-03-31)

• add support for Oracle Wallet (connect with blank username and password)
• bug 13880813: incorrectly classifying NUMBER columns as integer
• bug 13904056: wrong result in dbWriteTable when inserting NAs
• add support for datetime and interval types (selects)

ROracle 1.1-1 (2012-02-02)

• Pass ownership and maintenance of ROracle to the Oracle R team.
• Drop Splus support.
• Totally reimplemented from the ground up using OCI.

ROracle 0.5-12 (2011-09-15)

• Code and cleanup.

ROracle 0.5-11 (2011-07-28)

• Added namespace to package.

ROracle 0.5-10

• Increased maximum SQL statement length from 20000 to 200000.
• Fixed buffer sizes when copying data frame to Oracle.
• Fixed casting of pointer assignments in C.
• Fixed broken links in man pages.

ROracle 0.5-9 (2007-10-14)

• Trivial changes to make "R CMD check" happy.

ROracle 0.5-7 (2006-02-13)

• Remove install.R (to be deprecated as of R 2.3.0).
• Allow empty username/passwords, as per ProC/C++ convention, fixed a memory leak when extracting char data, and added a workaround for the incorrect Oracle 9.2 sgls() that reports no select on the first query (thanks to David Hinds for all these patches).
• Modified the configure.in to define the C macro RS_ORA_SQLGLS_WORKAROUND when the Oracle version is 9* (should we restirict it to 9i and >9.2?). If the macro is defined, we use David Hinds' patch to guess whether the SQL statement being prepared is a select or not.
• Yet another Pro C/C++ bug workaround. Added --enable-prefetch=1 to the configure script to allow a workaround to the ProC/C++ bug when building on an Oracle 8i but connecting to a Oracle 9i server (thanks to Marco Kienzle for the very informative Pro C/C++ bug report).
• Trivial changes to Makefile.win to create windows binaries for 2.2.1.
• Fixed documentation typos.

ROracle 0.5-6

• After trial and error (under Linux, older Oracle 8), the size for the internal dynamic statment (RS_ORA_STATEMENT_LEN) was increased to 20000 characters (the Oracle documentation is apparently silent on how big the statement string can be). This should allow exporting data.frames up to ~255 columns. Your mileage may vary.
• Include a workaround in oraQuickSQL() to the Pro C/C++ 9.2 bug or "feature" that causes sqlgls() to return the wrong SQL function code (we rely on the value 04 to identify SELECT statements). See the Pro C/C++ Readme file.
• Thanks to Sunny Ho's painstaking detective work, ROracle now includes SQLCA.H and SQLDA.H (all uppercase) to avoid the nasty PostgreSQL/Oracle co-existance problem (at least) on Red Hat linux systems. For details, see Sunny's 2004-11-23 posting to R-help "ROracle: fetch return zero rows or empty dataset (a workaround)".
• Fixed the problem of leaving connections open upon disconnection (thanks to Rebeca Steffan for the hint.)
• Fixed bug where the indicator variables for prepared statements were not re-initialized (thanks to David Hinds for the patch).
• Fixed typo in oraRollbackback().
• Fixed bug in dbReadTable's method that incorrectly processed the default for detecting row names.

ROracle 0.5-5 (2004-06-22)

• Fixed documentation typos.

ROracle 0.5-4 (2004-04-22)

• Fixed a bug in configure.in that was statically linking by default when it should have been dynamically linking and ignoring --enable-static=no. I also changed the default to static linking (this avoids having to set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH).
• Added the configure arg --enable-extralibs (-lsqlplus by default) to append oracle libraries to PKG_LIBS. This, of course, should never be needed, but on some Linux Oracle 9 systems the libcnltsh.so library apparently does not include the sqlca symbol. This argument works around this problem. For details see the file README.Oracle9.
• added the missing PACKAGE= argument to a couple .Call invocations.

ROracle 0.5-3 (2003-11-05)

• Yet many more changes to the documentation structure (not the contents) due to changes in the R help system.

ROracle 0.5-2

• Ported to Windows 2000 (see src/Makefile.win for details).
• Fixed a bug in RS_Ora_cpyOraToDataFrame that manifest (apparently) only in 64-bit version of R *and* Oracle when copying integers from Oracle's buffers to the output data.frame (thanks to Joerg Shaber for helping identifying this one).
• Added --enable-oracle32=[default|yes|no] to the configure script to allow R 32-bit binaries to access Oracle's 64-lib installations (thanks to Don MacQueen for finding the right incantation). See the file INSTALL for more details.
• Added a patch to work around a bug in (what I think) is in the Oracle 9 Pro C/C++ sqlgls() function. See the file README.Oracle9.

ROracle 0.5-1

• Fixed a bug in oraQuickSQL() that would incorrectly return an OraPrepareStatement object instead of plain OraResult with select statements.
• Fixed a typo in dbExistsTable().
• Fixed a bug where an invalid connection string of the form "user@password" (instead of the correct "user/password[@dbname]") would cause a crash.

ROracle 0.5-0 (2003-04-18)

• This version has an experimental dynamic SQL binding to data frame columns. SQL statements can be "prepared" (parsed and cached for improved performance), and columns of data frames bound to them for automatic data transfer). For details see the help() for "Oracle", "dbPrepareStatement" and "dbExecStatement". (Note, dbPrepareStatement() and dbExecStatement() are extension to the DBI package.)
• Host arrays are now operational. These are buffers used by Oracle's internal implementation to reduce network traffic and speed up fetches and prepared statements. Currently fetches use a default buffer size (host arrays) of size 500 (previous version did no buffering). **Very preliminary** results suggest performance improvements on fetching of about a factor of 2. (Note that the maximum size of these buffers is limited to about 65K bytes per column.)
• dbCommit() and dbRollback() are now explicitly implemented, but save points are not (you may code them through dynamic SQL).
• The precompiler ProC/C++ is now used with the option PARSE=none to avoid bogus C errors with some compilers and/or platforms (e.g., Mac OS X).

ROracle 0.4-0 (2002-08-26)

• The package is now compliant with the R/S Database interface (DBI), see package DBI 0.1-4. This means that almost all functions have new names, but the functionality is exactly the same as the last version.
• Simplified the underlying (support) functions by deleting more than a few, and changing their names to start with "ora" (the previous function and their names where a vestige of S3 style methods, which we no longer need).
• No changes to the C code (except for minor changes to RS_DBI.c to generate more helpful error messages in case of internal errors).

ROracle 0.3-3 (2002-05-20)

• NOTE: Next major version will comply with the emerging common database interface DBI, if agreed by the R-SIG-DB. This will probably change the function names, but not the basic functionality.
• Some minor clean up of the RS-DBI C code.
• Updated the use of NAs in strings in the C code, according to the new 1.5.0 stricter rules.
• added a PROTECT() when re-setting the length of output data.frame during fetching that could lead to random core dumps (thanks to Don MacQueen for reporting this pesky bug).
• getInfo() on a connection object now also returns the password used on the connection (needed, e.g., in assignTable, see below).
• A few fixes to assignTable.OraConnection: A bug in the SQL*Loader script that assignTable() creates to efficiently transfer data.frames to Oracle (the bug was that NAs in the last column caused SQL*Loader to fail); assingTable() now also provides the password in the call to SQL*Loader to avoid being prompted for it. Added an argument "batch=10000"; this is used to write.table() these many rows at a time from the data.frame in order to avoid huge memory build ups. It's still shamefully slow (due to write.table), but at least it won't exhaust memory. [Need to find an efficient alternative to write.table(), perhaps we need to write our own specialized C code?]
• Extended the size of the internal connections parameters (user, password and dbname) to 1024 to allow users to embed the tnsnames.ora string, e.g., con <- dbConnect(Oracle(), "user/passwd@(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(PROTOCOL=TCP)(HOST=foo.misc.de)(PORT=1521))(CONNECT_DATA=(SID=TEST)) [this seems to be an undocumented "feature" that Oracle gurus use quite commonly when they don't have privileges to update the network config file $ORALCE_HOME/network/admin/tnsname.ora (thanks to Michael Mader for this trick!]
• ifdef all S4/Splus' idioms if(IS_LIST(x)) x = AS_LIST(x). I'm not sure whether these should be PROTECTED in R, but since the idiom is only needed in S4/Splus5+, it's better not to have it in R.
• Fixed a bug in SQLDataType.OraConnection (wrong signature).
• Added dbObject validity checks to a bunch of the meta-data functions.

ROracle 0.3-2

• Added code to be able to copy data.frames to Oracle, see assignTable().

ROracle 0.3-1 (2001-11-09)

• Note that if you statically link against the Oracle libraries you may move the resulting package to systems w.o. Oracle (of course, subject to the other system being binary compatible). If you do this, you may need to provide additional Oracle configuration parameters to ROracle. See the file "README.client" for details.
• Ported to R, added a configure script.
• Implemented a workaround to the very nasty bug in the linux implementation of the ProC/C++ (as of 8.1.[567]) (see the function filter_buggy_error() in RS-Oracle.pc) The sign was that Oracle would give a "fetch out of order" error when there was no fetching going on.
• Modified the documentation to pass R CMD check. Unfortunately we now have two separate versions of the help (one for Splus, another for R). Splus-specific
• It nows does the #include "S.h" conditionally, for the sake of Splus 6.0 (you need to define the macro SPLUS6 in the makefile).