The DB API Binary function should accept bytes. #628
Description
(3.8) jim@ds9:~/p/g/python-bigquery-sqlalchemy$ python
Python 3.8.5 (default, Jan 27 2021, 15:41:15)
[GCC 9.3.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import google.cloud.bigquery.dbapi
>>> google.cloud.bigquery.dbapi.Binary(b'x')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
File "/home/jim/p/g/python-bigquery/google/cloud/bigquery/dbapi/types.py", line 42, in Binary
return string.encode("utf-8")
AttributeError: 'bytes' object has no attribute 'encode'
Bytes are the most common way to represent binary data. Accepting strings, as it does now seems at best to be a convenience and at worst a bug magnet.
In SQLAlchemy, if you defined a model that has a binary attribute, you'd store bytes data in it, but that would break for bigquery, di to this issue.
Sqlite's Binary function requires bytes data.
I propose to change the function to accept bytes. For the sake of backward compatibility, I propose to continue to accept strings.