PostgreSQL

URL

http://www.postgresql.org/

licence

BSD

platforms

Unix, win32 (NT-based Microsoft operating system)

Pros

From the features page:

• 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

• Native Windows version is implemented in the PostgreSQL 8.x version, and just for Windows NT 4.0 / 2000 / XP / 2003. For running on other Windows platform or an older version than 8.0 there is a Cygwin version.

DB API 2.0 Drivers

PyGreSQL

URL

http://www.pygresql.org/

licence

BSD-like

platforms

Unix, win32

Python versions

1.5.2 thru 2.4

Maintenance

Last version released is 3.8.1 (2006-06-05)

psycopg1

URL

http://initd.org/software/initd/psycopg1

Licence

GPL

Platforms

Unix, win32 (beta)

Python versions

Maintenance

development stalled (as of 12/2008)

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

• Win32 binaries can be found here http://www.stickpeople.com/projects/python/psycopg/

psycopg2

URL

http://initd.org/software/initd/psycopg2

Licence

GPL

Platforms

Unix, win32 (beta)

Python versions

Maintenance

Active development

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.

mxODBC

URL

http://www.egenix.com/products/python/mxODBC/

Licence

eGenix Commercial License

Platforms

Windows, Linux, MacOS X, FreeBSD, Solaris, AIX

Python versions

2.1 - 2.5

mxODBC is compatible with the PostgreSQL ODBC driver on Windows and Unix.

Note that you have to enable the advanced option "Use bytea for lo" in case you want to work with BLOBs.

Other Python Interfaces for PostgreSQL

These entries still need to be updated to the standard format (see above):

• PoPy: http://sourceforge.net/projects/popy

  • PoPy and PyGreSQL are merging

• pg/python: http://python.projects.postgresql.org/

  • pg_proboscis: DB-API 2.0 and GreenTrunk Interfaces http://python.projects.postgresql.org/project/pg_proboscis.html

  • pg_pqueue: PQ 3.0 Protocol elements http://python.projects.postgresql.org/project/pg_pqueue.html

• pgasync: http://jamwt.com/pgasync/

  • Asynchronous and pure Python. Speed comparable to C bindings. Special support for Twisted.

• bpgsql: http://barryp.org/software/bpgsql/

  • Barebones pure-Python PostgreSQL client

• sipPQ

Supported Python Applications

• Zope

• DbDoc

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