Dietz, thank you for your answer.
> It's called NLS (national language support), >and it is like a locale-setting in python/C. I'm too lazy to google right Sad thing: I allready googled that and had to learn: you CAN definitely change some parameters, that is sort order and language for error messages with alter session set NLSREGION and set NLSLANGUAGE The only part about the charset is with NLSLANG, which could be set to German_Germany.UTF8 BUT ... NLSLANG is no per-session parameter, not setable per alter session, it needs to get set within the environment to make SQLPLUS recognize it. (and, I do of course use python not sqlplus= In another of the WWW I learned that NLSLANG has to be set on per connection basis; not on per cursor / session basis; so my primary suspect is cx_Oracle.Connection ... but those objects to not have a visible method with any "encoding" in it. Harald -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
