- rework Oracle to no longer do its own unicode conversion; this has been observed
to be very slow.  this now has the effect of producing "conditional" unicode
conversion for the Oracle backend, as it still returns NVARCHAR etc. as unicode
[ticket:2911]
- add new "conditional" functionality to unicode processors; the C-level
function now uses PyUnicode_Check() as a fast alternative to the isinstance()
check in Python