UnicodeDecodeError with pandas.read_sql

the proper encoding for your database is iso-8859-1 according to oracle docs so When you connect() to your database, pass the charset='iso-8859-1' or encoding='iso-8859-1' try both.

Python3.7:

con = sqlite3.connect(path_to_db)
encoding = "latin1"
con.text_factory = lambda x: str(x, encoding)
# do not preserve non-printable
# con.text_factory = lambda x: str(x, "ascii", errors="ignore")
data = pd.read_sql_query(QUERY, con)

Pydocs on text_factory