Connection to Oracle using proxy user

[andersonrl66]

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Question

How to connect to Oracle using a proxy user ? When i try to connect using a proxy user (ex.: user_app[proxy_user]) i receive a message of invalid url. When i encode the user (ex.: user_app%5Bproxy_user%5D) i receive a message of invalid credentials. I tested the credentials using oracledb in python and it worked.

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[anubhav756]

Hi @andersonrl66. Thank you for reporting this!

@duwenxin99, could you take a quick look and see if this could be that the underlying Go Oracle driver we use just handles proxy users a bit differently than the Python's driver?

IIUC, it seems like standard Go URL parsing might be tripping up on the brackets, and when they are URL-encoded instead, go-ora might actually be expecting the proxy user to be passed in a different way rather than bundled directly in the username string.

If that's the case, maybe we can just automatically parse the user_app[proxy_user] format under the hood and convert it to the URL parameters the driver wants to see if that works out of the box?

[DEVELOPER-DEEVEN]

Thanks for the report. This looks like URL parsing rather than Oracle auth: proxy syntax user[client] is valid for Oracle, but [ ] are not valid in URL userinfo, so parsers like SQLAlchemy make_url reject it. When you percent‑encode, the parser accepts it but the SDK likely passes the encoded username through to the driver, so Oracle sees %5B/%5D and auth fails.

Workaround: avoid URL strings for proxy users; pass user + proxy separately via structured config / connect_args (if supported by the SDK), e.g. user="proxy_user" and proxy_user="client_user".

Fix idea: decode percent‑encoded usernames before handing off to the driver, or accept bracketed usernames during parsing and use URL.create() with explicit username/password fields.

[DEVELOPER-DEEVEN]

I opened a tracking issue on the core toolbox repo: googleapis/genai-toolbox#2454 — since the SDK itself doesn’t appear to parse database URLs. The fix likely belongs in the service/config layer.