SOCKS proxy support for Thin Mode

[henzef]

I am currently using the Oracle JDBC driver via JayDeBeApi to connect to an oracle database, which is far from ideal. Unfortunately I have to make this connection via a SOCKS proxy for reasons outside of my control.
As I would like to port my application to python-oracledb, I am wondering if SOCKS proxy support is planned in the near or distant future?

[anthony-tuininga]

There aren't any current plans but it is on our list of enhancements. It would help if you can provide a bit more detail on what you think SOCKS proxy support might look like. Would it be as simple as adding an additional set of parameters: socks_proxy_host and socks_proxy_port? Or is the SOCKS proxy protocol important as well?

Have you tried monkeypatching as suggested by the PySocks documentation? Although not a good long-term solution it gives some indication of how much effort would be involved in adding this support.

[lassegit]

Or is the SOCKS proxy protocol important as well?

I would like to see this. Most other database clients implements this in one form or another allowing to setup a Socks proxy in front for static IP. I am actually using https://github.com/oracle/node-oracledb – but can't find any information/discussion in that repo.

[cjbj]

@lassegit can you open an enhancement in that repo so it can be tracked there too?

[kyokley]

I would like to see this feature as well. I tried the suggestion to use PySocks to monkeypatch socket from the standard lib and was able to successfully make connections and run queries in thin mode. However, I'm working on an application that requires thick mode where, maybe unsurprisingly, monkeypatching does nothing. I'm new to working with OracleDB but my understanding is that in thick mode, an external client is used. Is it possible to add socks support there as well?

[anthony-tuininga]

Thanks for confirming that monkeypatching works as expected for thin mode. You are correct that this will not work with thick mode, which requires the Oracle Client libraries. Why does your application require thick mode? It is always good to know what is preventing users from using thin mode -- which is the eventual end goal and is considerably more flexible among other advantages.

[kyokley]

Our application relies on TAC, at least, in production. Outside of production, we have some test databases on our network available for dev that I'm trying to connect to but, because of some networking issues, I'm unable to connect directly. I've been trying to get around those, hence the request for SOCKS.

For now, since I don't need TAC locally, I'm going to see if I can force our application to run in thin mode with the monkeypatch hack. Wish me luck 🤞