Cursor class scaffolded with full PEP 249 surface:
src/informix_db/cursors.py — Cursor with execute, fetchone, fetchmany,
fetchall, description, rowcount, arraysize, close, iterator,
context manager. Sends SQ_COMMAND chains for parameterless SQL
(Phase 4 adds SQ_BIND/SQ_EXECUTE for params).
src/informix_db/_resultset.py — ColumnInfo, parse_describe,
parse_tuple_payload. Best-effort SQ_DESCRIBE parser; refines in
Phase 2.1.
src/informix_db/connections.py — Connection.cursor() now returns a
real Cursor; new _send_pdu() lets Cursor share the connection's
socket without violating encapsulation.
Protocol findings landed in PROTOCOL_NOTES.md §6:
§6a — SQ_PREPARE format with named tags (the "trailing 22, 49"
are SQ_NDESCRIBE and SQ_WANTDONE chained into the same PDU).
Confirmed against IfxSqli.sendPrepare line 1062.
§6c — Server requires post-login init sequence (SQ_PROTOCOLS →
SQ_INFO → SQ_ID(env vars) → SQ_DBOPEN) BEFORE any PREPARE works.
Discovered the hard way: PREPARE without this sequence gets no
response; SQ_DBOPEN without SQ_PROTOCOLS gets sqlcode=-759
("Database not available"). The login PDU's database field is
a hint, not an open.
§6e — SQ_TUPLE corrected: [short warn][int size][bytes payload]
(not [int 0][short payloadLen] as earlier draft claimed).
Two more constants added to _messages.MessageType:
SQ_NDESCRIBE = 22, SQ_WANTDONE = 49
Tests: 40 unit + 7 integration (added 2 new — cursor() returns a
Cursor, parameter binding raises NotSupportedError). All green, ruff
clean. Removed obsolete "cursor() raises NotImplementedError" test.
What works end-to-end now: connect, cursor(), close, parameter-attempt
gating. What doesn't yet: cursor.execute("SELECT 1") — server requires
the post-login init sequence we don't yet send.
Discovered captures (kept for next session's analysis):
docs/CAPTURES/06-py-select1-attempt.socat.log
docs/CAPTURES/07-py-replay-jdbc-prepare.socat.log
docs/CAPTURES/08-py-with-dbopen.socat.log
docs/CAPTURES/09-py-full-replay.socat.log
Three new tasks created tracking the remaining Phase 2 blockers:
post-login init sequence, proper SQ_DESCRIBE parser, SQ_ID action
vocabulary helpers.
This commit takes informix-db from documentation-only (Phase 0 spike)
to a functional connect() / close() against a real Informix server.
To our knowledge, this is the first pure-socket Informix client in any
language — no CSDK, no JVM, no native libraries.
Layered architecture per the plan, mirroring PyMySQL's shape:
src/informix_db/
__init__.py — PEP 249 surface (connect, exceptions, paramstyle="numeric")
exceptions.py — full PEP 249 hierarchy declared up front
_socket.py — raw socket I/O (read_exact, write_all, timeouts)
_protocol.py — IfxStreamReader / IfxStreamWriter framing primitives
(big-endian, 16-bit-aligned variable payloads,
length-prefixed nul-terminated strings)
_messages.py — SQ_* tags from IfxMessageTypes + ASF/login markers
_auth.py — pluggable auth handlers; plain-password is the
only Phase-1 implementation
connections.py — Connection class: builds the binary login PDU
(SLheader + PFheader byte-for-byte per
PROTOCOL_NOTES.md §3), sends it, parses the
server response, wires up close()
Phase 1 design decisions locked in DECISION_LOG.md:
- paramstyle = "numeric" (matches Informix ESQL/C convention)
- Python >= 3.10
- autocommit defaults to off (PEP 249 implicit)
- License: MIT
- Distribution name: informix-db (verified PyPI-available)
Test coverage: 34 unit tests (codec round-trips against synthetic byte
streams; observed login-PDU values from the spike captures asserted as
exact byte literals) + 6 integration tests (connect, idempotent close,
context manager, bad-password → OperationalError, bad-host →
OperationalError, cursor() raises NotImplementedError).
pytest — runs 34 unit tests, no Docker needed
pytest -m integration — runs 6 integration tests against the
Developer Edition container (pinned by digest
in tests/docker-compose.yml)
pytest -m "" — runs everything
ruff is clean across src/ and tests/.
One bug found during smoke testing: threading.get_ident() can exceed
signed 32-bit on some processes, overflowing struct.pack("!i"). Fixed
the same way the JDBC reference does — clamp to signed 32-bit, fall
back to 0 if out of range. The field is diagnostic only.
One protocol-level observation that AMENDED the JDBC source reading:
the "capability section" in the login PDU is three independently
negotiated 4-byte ints (Cap_1=1, Cap_2=0x3c000000, Cap_3=0), not one
int + 8 reserved zero bytes as my CFR decompile read suggested. The
server echoes them back identically. Trust the wire over the
decompiler.
Phase 1 verification matrix (from PROTOCOL_NOTES.md §12):
- Login byte layout: confirmed (server accepts our pure-Python PDU)
- Disconnection: confirmed (SQ_EXIT round-trip works)
- Framing primitives: confirmed (34 unit tests)
- Error path: bad password → OperationalError, bad host → OperationalError
Phase 2 (Cursor / SELECT / basic types) is the next phase. The hard
unknowns there — exact column-descriptor layout, statement-time error
format — were called out as bounded gaps in Phase 0 and have existing
captures (02-select-1.socat.log, 02-dml-cycle.socat.log) to characterize
against.
