If you are used to stdlib but want sane transactional semantics or the ability to easily statically link your own SQLite implementation (eg to have encryption), I’ve written some bindings as well:
This supersedes my earlier pysqlite3 project. Perf is better than stdlib, but not as good as apsw. Roger is doing amazing work and I urge anyone wanting to fully utilize SQLite to try apsw. It does everything, exposes all API surfaces, and has a fantastic track record.
In a sentence, I'd say apsw is "the SQLite lover's SQLite library". The python stdlib one tries to provide a generic interface ("DBAPI") which is great if you want to be able to swap to a different database engine later, but it's bad for actually getting the most out of SQLite.
It's not even that good for switching to different engines.
My normal mode of operation is via postgres(I like the functions better than sqlite) But for a recent little program thought it would be nice to have it a little more self contained and allow for a sqlite db if wanted. Ignoring the the sql differences(Remember, I use postgres for it's functions, so there were many) sqlite uses a different parameter style(I ended up writing an automatic converter to transform my psycopg3 style "%(name)s" to sqlite3's ":name") and I had got in the (perhaps bad) habit of keeping an open connection and using a context manager on the cursor where sqlite does not like that and really wants the context manager on the connection. The final hoop to jump through was getting the row output as a dict. Not super relevant as it is not default on psycopg either, but it takes a bit more effort on sqlite3.
So yes it is possible to make the database swapable, But even with the dbapi, it is not trivial.
This library is great, and recently saved a project of mine. Figuring out what was going on with some of python's sqlite3 quirks was too much of a hassle, meanwhile this more or less just worked the way I expected it to. Because of this experience I started defaulting to it over sqlite3 for other projects as well.
I was experimenting with APSW and I noticed that when a query doesn't return any row, it becomes difficult to get column names from the cursor, is there any recommended way to do this ?
If you are used to stdlib but want sane transactional semantics or the ability to easily statically link your own SQLite implementation (eg to have encryption), I’ve written some bindings as well:
https://github.com/coleifer/cysqlite
This supersedes my earlier pysqlite3 project. Perf is better than stdlib, but not as good as apsw. Roger is doing amazing work and I urge anyone wanting to fully utilize SQLite to try apsw. It does everything, exposes all API surfaces, and has a fantastic track record.
In a sentence, I'd say apsw is "the SQLite lover's SQLite library". The python stdlib one tries to provide a generic interface ("DBAPI") which is great if you want to be able to swap to a different database engine later, but it's bad for actually getting the most out of SQLite.
It's not even that good for switching to different engines.
My normal mode of operation is via postgres(I like the functions better than sqlite) But for a recent little program thought it would be nice to have it a little more self contained and allow for a sqlite db if wanted. Ignoring the the sql differences(Remember, I use postgres for it's functions, so there were many) sqlite uses a different parameter style(I ended up writing an automatic converter to transform my psycopg3 style "%(name)s" to sqlite3's ":name") and I had got in the (perhaps bad) habit of keeping an open connection and using a context manager on the cursor where sqlite does not like that and really wants the context manager on the connection. The final hoop to jump through was getting the row output as a dict. Not super relevant as it is not default on psycopg either, but it takes a bit more effort on sqlite3.
So yes it is possible to make the database swapable, But even with the dbapi, it is not trivial.
Why do you say it's bad?
Everything to do with transactions, including nested transactions.
For anyone interested in an ergonomic API over this-- I ported sqlite-utils to apsw a while back: https://github.com/AnswerDotAI/apswutils
I've been using it a lot over the last year or two and it's worked great.
This library is great, and recently saved a project of mine. Figuring out what was going on with some of python's sqlite3 quirks was too much of a hassle, meanwhile this more or less just worked the way I expected it to. Because of this experience I started defaulting to it over sqlite3 for other projects as well.
(This documentation page explains the library's intent: https://rogerbinns.github.io/apsw/pysqlite.html)
what quirks did you bump into with sqlite3?
Thank you HackerNews. I learned something new and will be using APSW for my next Sqlite project.
I was experimenting with APSW and I noticed that when a query doesn't return any row, it becomes difficult to get column names from the cursor, is there any recommended way to do this ?
It’s a great wrapper, but we should add a year. Not exactly new.
The latest commit was 1 hour ago
ahh. It’s been around a while, but maybe the date convention is for articles not repos.
Abandonware!
new to many people, just not you.