Microsoft SQL Server

URL

http://www.microsoft.com/sql/default.mspx

licence

commercial/proprietary software, although a free (gratis) edition "SQL Server 2005 Express" is available

platforms

Windows 2000 and later

Pros

• SQL Server is a robust and fully-featured database, and it performs very well. Moreover, I have not had any problems using this database with Python.
• The SQL Server Express versions are free to download, use and can even be redistributed with products.

Cons

• Windows only.
• SQL Server comes in various flavours. The regular version includes the GUI tools and also provides advanced features which are not included in SQL Server Express.

DB API 2.0 Drivers

adodbapi

URL

http://adodbapi.sourceforge.net/

SourceForge

http://sourceforge.net/projects/adodbapi

licence

LGPL

platforms

Windows only

pymssql

URL

http://pymssql.sourceforge.net/

SourceForge

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pymssql

licence

LGPL

platforms

Windows and Unix

mssql

URL

http://www.object-craft.com.au/projects/mssql/

licence

BSD

platforms

Windows

mxODBC

URL

http://www.egenix.com/

License

eGenix.com Commercial License

Platforms

Windows, Unix, Mac OSX, FreeBSD, Solaris

mxODBC requires an ODBC driver to talk to SQL Server. On Windows, this comes with SQL Server, on the other platforms, there are several commercial ODBC high quality drivers available. There's also a FreeTDS ODBC driver which is free.

Unicode is supported both for data and SQL statements. mxODBC supports both 32-bit and 64-bit platforms.

pyodbc

URL

http://code.google.com/p/pyodbc

License

MIT

Platforms

Windows, Linux, MacOS X, FreeBSD, Solaris, Any (source provided)

Python versions

2.4 - 2.6

Actively maintained Open Source project.

Precompiled binaries are available for Windows. RedHat Enterprise Linux, Centos, and Fedora have precompiled RPMs available in their Extras repositories.

Supports ANSI and Unicode data and SQL statements.

Has an extensive set of unit tests for SQL Server.

ODBC

It is possible to connect to an SQL Server database using ODBC, either the mxODBC driver or the one included with Win32all. However, this is not recommended - adodbapi is a better solution, in part because it supports unicode.

Comment: This is actually not true at all: ODBC is the native API used for SQL Server and does support Unicode all the way. In fact, ODBC is the preferred way of accessing SQL Server if you care for performance. Microsoft has just released the SQL Server Native Client which is an extended ODBC driver for SQL Server. ADO is just a layer on top of the ODBC interface and a lot slower as a result. See e.g. MS TechNet for a comparison of ODBC, OLE DB and ADO, or this cookbook entry.