cx_Oracle & Connecting to Oracle DB Remotely

Question

How do you connect to a remote server via IP address in the manner that TOAD, SqlDeveloper, are able to connect to databases with just the ip address, username, SID and password?

Whenever I try to specify and IP address, it seems to be taking it locally.

In other words, how should the string for cx_Oracle.connect() be formatted to a non local database?

There was a previous post which listed as an answer connecting to Oracle via cx_Oracle module with the following code:

#!/usr/bin/python

import cx_Oracle
connstr='scott/tiger'
conn = cx_Oracle.connect(connstr)
curs = conn.cursor()

curs.execute('select * from emp')
print curs.description
for row in curs:
    print row
conn.close()

Answer 1

I like to do it this way:

ip = '192.168.0.1'
port = 1521
SID = 'YOURSIDHERE'
dsn_tns = cx_Oracle.makedsn(ip, port, SID)

db = cx_Oracle.connect('username', 'password', dsn_tns)

One of the main reasons I like this method is that I usually have a TNSNAMES.ORA file lying around someplace, and I can check that the dsn_tns object will do the right thing by doing:

print dsn_tns

and comparing the output to my TNSNAMES.ORA