Raising GLOBAL_LOG_LEVEL to WARNING buys quieter output but not less work: 241 INFO call sites interpolate their payload into an f-string before the logging call gets to drop it. The heaviest is get_doc, which logs every chunk id and metadata dict in a collection, so on the full-context retrieval path that is the entire knowledge base, once per chat request.
That one line at WARNING, CPython 3.12:
| knowledge base | payload | before | after |
| -------------- | ------- | -------- | ------- |
| top-k of 3 | 1.2 kB | 3.8 us | 0.07 us |
| 500 chunks | 201 kB | 583.6 us | 0.08 us |
| 5000 chunks | 2.0 MB | 5.8 ms | 0.15 us |
The lazy form log.info('query_doc:result %s %s', result.ids, result.metadatas) hands the payload to record.getMessage(), which the InterceptHandler only reaches once a record has passed the level check. Output at INFO is byte-identical. Two sites that already built their message eagerly, one str concat and one % operator, move to the same lazy form.
`_json_to_metadata` parses the metadata of every result row returned by search and get. It now goes through `JSONCodec`, which selects orjson when `ENABLE_ORJSON` is set.
The text it parses is produced by Oracle's own `JSON_SERIALIZE`, and the column is a native `JSON` type, so the database normalises whatever was written and the reader never depends on the writer's escaping.
The matching `_metadata_to_json` write deliberately keeps stdlib `json`: it passes `default=self._decimal_handler`, orjson accepts none of stdlib's keyword arguments, and dropping the handler would turn a currently successful insert of a `Decimal` into a hard failure. The read side has no such constraint.
With `ENABLE_ORJSON` unset, which is the default, `JSONCodec` is stdlib `json` and this call site behaves exactly as before.
