SQLAlchemy MetaData.reflect not finding tables in Oracle db

Question

I'm attempting to reverse engineer an existing Oracle schema into some declarative SQLAlchemy models. My problem is that when I use MetaData.reflect, it doesn't find the tables in my schema, just a Global Temp Table. However, I can still query against the other tables.

I'm using SQLAlchemy 0.7.8, CentOS 6.2 x86_64, python 2.6, cx_Oracle 5.1.2 and Oracle 11.2.0.2 Express Edition. Here's a quick sample of what I'm talking about:

>>> import sqlalchemy
>>> engine = sqlalchemy.create_engine('oracle+cx_oracle://user:pass@localhost/xe')
>>> md = sqlalchemy.MetaData(bind=engine)
>>> md.reflect()
>>> md.tables
immutabledict({u'my_gtt': Table(u'my_gtt', MetaData(bind=Engine(oracle+cx_oracle://user:pass@localhost/xe)), Column(u'id', NUMBER(precision=15, scale=0, asdecimal=False), table=<my_gtt>), Column(u'parent_id', NUMBER(precision=15, scale=0, asdecimal=False), table=<my_gtt>), Column(u'query_id', NUMBER(precision=15, scale=0, asdecimal=False), table=<my_gtt>), schema=None)})
>>> len(engine.execute('select * from my_regular_table').fetchall())
4

Answer 1

Thanks to some quick help from @zzzeek I discovered (by using the echo='debug' argument to create_engine) that my problem was caused by the tables being owned by an old user, even though the current user could access them from the default schema without requiring any explicit synonyms.