TableOfContents

Masthead

URL

http://www.postgresql.org/

licence

BSD-like

platforms

Unix, win32 (Cygwin); a native win32 port is in the works

DB API 2.0 Drivers

PyGresQL

URL

http://www.PyGreSQL.org/

licence

BSD-like (depends on mxDateTime, which may be GPL-incompatible)

platforms

Unix, win32

Python versions

1.5.2 thru 2.4

Maintenance

Last version released Dec 13, 2004

Extensions to DB API

• Alternative old nonstandard PostgreSQL interface

Comments

PoPy

URL

http://popy.sourceforge.net

Licence

GPL

Platforms

Unix

Python versions

Maintenance

Last release 8/2001. Eventually merged with PyGresQL. http://zope.org/Members/tm/Full_Announce (as of 10/2003)

Extensions to DB API

Comments

psycopg

URL

http://initd.org/software/initd/psycopg

Licence

GPL

Platforms

Unix, win32 (beta)

Python versions

Maintenance

Active development, frequent updates (as of 10/2003)

Extensions to DB API

• dictfetchone(), dictfetchmany(), dictfechall() methods on the cursor object; these will return dictionaries instead of tuples, so you can access rows by name instead of by index

Comments

• Written for heavily multithreaded applications in mind.

• Offers a few advanced features over PoPy

pyPgSQL

URL

http://pypgsql.sourceforge.net

Licence

BSD-like (depends on mxDateTime, which may be GPL-incompatible)

Platforms

Unix, win32

Python versions

2.1 thru 2.3

Maintenance

Active, sporatic (as of 10/2003)

Extensions to DB API

• The fetch methods on cursors return an instances of PgResultSet, which you can use to access rows by index (like in DB-API), dictionary-like or with attributes. This feature can be turned off for a slight performance boost.

• Support for PostgreSQL notifications in the low-level API.

Comments

Other Drivers

driver name

URL

licence

platforms

Python versions

Programming Model

Comments

Supported Python Applications

• ["Zope"]

• DbDoc

• three PostgreSQL drivers (using pgdb, included with the PostgreSQL distro, pypgsql, and psycopg) exist for ["PyDO"] (Python Data Objects)

Pros

• Good compliance with SQL standards
• Supports many SQL features
  • Foreign keys
  • Implements all SQL99 join types: inner join, left, right, full outer join, natural join
  • Subqueries
  • UNION and UNION ALL, INTERSECT and EXCEPT
  • Views
  • Triggers
• Support for international character sets, multibyte character encodings, Unicode
• Supports many languages for writing server-side functions/procedures and aggregates: Python, C, Perl, Tcl, PL/PgSQL, ...
• ACID compliant
• Support for rollback
• Serializable transaction isolation
• Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC) for highly scalable concurrent applications

Cons

• No native Windows version (yet), but there is a Cygwin version.