General Information about the OCI plugin

The OCI plugin supports Oracle 9i, 10g and higher. After connecting to the Oracle server, the plugin will auto-detect the database version and enable features accordingly.

It is possible to connect to a Oracle database without a tnsnames.ora file. This requires that the database SID is passed to the driver as the database name and that a hostname is given.

OCI User Authentication

The OCI plugin supports authentication using external credentials (OCI_CRED_EXT). Usually, this means that the database server will use the user authentication provided by the operating system instead of its own authentication mechanism.

Leave the username and password empty when opening a connection with QSqlDatabase to use the external credentials authentication.

OCI BLOB/LOB Support

Binary Large Objects (BLOBs) can be read and written, but be aware that this process may require a lot of memory. You should use a forward only query to select LOB fields (see QSqlQuery::setForwardOnly()).

Inserting BLOBs should be done using either a prepared query where the BLOBs are bound to placeholders or QSqlTableModel, which uses a prepared query to do this internally.