CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonmysqldatabasepostgresql
user3326384
user3326384

Reputation: 43

Coming to python from perl, i'm wondering if there's something like DBI for python?

In perl, DBI module is the standard way of interacting with DBs, where each DB vendor provides its own DBD module which is used by the DBI. (It's somewhat similar to JDBC.) I can't figure out if a similar model exists in python. In case of Postgres, I see there are pg and pgdb modules, where pgdb follows DB-API 2.0 and pg doesn't. Should I care about that? If I go with pgdb, should I expect the same interface from a MySQL db module, which follows DB-API 2.0 ?

Thank you!

Upvotes: 2

Views: 298

Answers (2)

Lie Ryan
Lie Ryan

Reputation: 64847

Yes, Python DBAPI 2.0 is the standard API for interacting with database in Python. Note though, that DBAPI is a very simple, low-level interface, by itself, it does not make it easy to write database queries that would be portable across different databases when different databases implement SQL differently.

For a higher level interface that do help you to write portable database application, you can check out SQLAlchemy. Both SQLalchemy core and ORM provides a language for querying database in portable way.

Upvotes: 1

khampson
khampson

Reputation: 15306

A popular module for interacting with Postgres in Python which is DB API 2.0 compliant is psycopg2 (http://initd.org/psycopg/docs/index.html).

That's the one I always use in my Python code to interact with Postgres. I find it straightforward to use, and it offers some nice extras that are fairly easy to add, such as dictionary-based cursors (i.e. DictCursor, where the rows are in a dictionary with the column names as keys, as opposed to an array).

There's also named cursors, where all you have to do is supply a cursor with a name, and psycopg2 will automatically create a server side cursor for you with a default chunk size of 2000, which you can iterate over as any other Python object, with the subsequent fetches going on transparently in the background.

Upvotes: 1

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