The session db backend throws UnicodeEncodeError when used with Oracle

[eatkin@…]

I am experiencing the same symptoms as Ticket #9935, but the supposedly fixed cx_oracle 5.1.1 doesn't resolve this issue. Neither does backdating to 4.4.1 or 4.2.1 (I tested all those). I'm running django 1.4. I ported directly over from a mysql backend that was working great. What else could be useful?

Here is my oracle version:

BANNER                                                         
----------------------------------------------------------------
Oracle9i Enterprise Edition Release 9.2.0.6.0 - Production       
PL/SQL Release 9.2.0.6.0 - Production                            
CORE	9.2.0.6.0	Production                                          
TNS for Linux: Version 9.2.0.6.0 - Production                    
NLSRTL Version 9.2.0.6.0 - Production                            

and the django error page:

UnicodeEncodeError at /provisioning/nid_list
'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-295: ordinal not in range(128)
Request Method:	GET
Request URL:	http://10.250.255.6:8000/provisioning/nid_list
Django Version:	1.4
Exception Type:	UnicodeEncodeError
Exception Value:	
'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-295: ordinal not in range(128)
Exception Location:	/usr/lib/python2.7/base64.py in decodestring, line 321
Python Executable:	/usr/bin/python2
Python Version:	2.7.3
Python Path:	
['/home/eatkin/django/utopia',
 '/usr/lib/python27.zip',
 '/usr/lib/python2.7',
 '/usr/lib/python2.7/plat-linux2',
 '/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-tk',
 '/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-old',
 '/usr/lib/python2.7/lib-dynload',
 '/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages',
 '/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/setuptools-0.6c11.egg-info']
Server time:	Thu, 17 May 2012 22:17:39 -0600

[Anssi Kääriäinen]

Could you provide example code, and the full stack trace?

[eatkin@…]

sample app demonstrating bug