(cherry picked from commit 859379e2fcc4506d036700ba1eca4c0ae526a8ee)

to get all flake8 passing

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

Python ``Decimal`` via string is now configurable.  The
flag ``decimal_return_scale`` is now supported by all :class:`.Numeric`
and :class:`.Float` types, which will ensure this many digits are taken
from the native floating point value when it is converted to string.
If not present, the type will make use of the value of ``.scale``, if
the type supports this setting and it is non-None.  Otherwise the original
default length of 10 is used. [ticket:2867]

- went through examples/ and cleaned out excess list() calls