Golang chatting with Oracle

Python is awesome. I like Python very much, but there are some cases where Python’s performance is just not enough. What other options do we have?
Well, there’s for example GoLang

Problem with GoLang is that there is not a lot on the Internet about using it with Oracle Databases. Let me show you some basic steps for configuring the environment.

The first step is to install GoLang – instructions can be found in here: https://golang.org/doc/install

To connect to Oracle, you need Oracle Client (it can be Oracle Instant Client).
I will configure my environment on my MAC and use Oracle Instant Client for MAC

To connect to Oracle, we will use goracle – it is a package which is a database/sql/driver.Driver for connecting to Oracle DB, using Anthony Tuininga’s excellent OCI wrapper, ODPI-C.

Let’s get the package:

Now we can set the environment variables and create our source code:

The base for our script will look like this:

Please note that we have to import goracle a bit differently than other packages – with "_" prefix. That’s because we will connect to the database like this: sql.Open("goracle", conn). So the "goracle" won’t be used directly in a code but as a string literal to SQL driver.

Let’s create a connection to the database and execute a simple query

Now we can compile our program and execute it:

Great! Let’s add more rows to the output and additional bind variable:

And here’s the result:

If you want to execute PL/SQL function or procedure and get the results, you can use sql.Out interface. For example, let’s create a sample PL/SQL function:

Now we can add a simple PL/SQL block to our GO function and use Exec method and sql.Out interface:

And here’s the result:

And it’s simple as that 🙂