ORA-03106 during substructure search with Python client

I’ve written some python code to run some cartridge queries every couple of hours to cache the indexes we have.


The process is open cursor > run queries > close cursor > close database connection.

  
The first time I ran the code it was fine, but now when I run it I get this error:- 
[...]$ ./cache_queries.py

in close db

closed cursor

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "./cache_queries.py", line 10, in <module>

    myup.dbClose()

  File "functions.py", line 661, in dbClose

    self.foo.close()

cx_Oracle.DatabaseError: ORA-29904: error in executing ODCIIndexClose() routine

ORA-01001: invalid cursor

ORA-06512: at "JCHEM.JCHEM_CORE_PKG", line 249

ORA-06512: at "JCHEM.JC_IDXTYPE_IM", line 654



Does this make sense to you? The queries I’m running are against smiles columns and binary fingerprint columns.


I can run the script executing queries that are just text/numerical based, the error only occurs when doing the cartridge searches.

I am opening and closing the python cursor, I don’t think that is the problem.

 On further investigation there is another error message being generated:-  
Error running substructure query ORA-03106: fatal two-task communication protocol error

 

I checked all my environment variables etc and tracked down the problem.


It was entirely in python, I was using a python 2.6 environment, calling methods from a python 2.6 module in a script where the #! header line was pointing to python 2.5. The version mismatch was forgiving for all standard queries but not for cartridge queries.


 


I hope this info might help someone in the future.