TableOfContents

Masthead

URL

http://sqlite.org/

licence

Sources are uncopyrighted. Use for any purpose.

platforms

Built and tested under Linux and Win2K.

DB API 2.0 Drivers

pysqlite

URL

http://pysqlite.org/

SourceForge

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pysqlite

licence

zlib/libpng License

platforms

Windows 95/98/2000/XP, POSIX, MacOS X

Python versions

2.1 or later (1.x branch)/2.3 or later (2.0 branch). Included in Python 2.5.

Extensions to DB API

• Extensible type conversion
• Factories for connection and cursor objects
• row converter factory to easily and efficiently switch to a nonstandard type for rows (e. g. dicts)
• User-defined functions and aggregates

Comments

Other Drivers

APSW

URL

http://www.rogerbinns.com/apsw.html

licence

zlib/libpng license

platforms

Windows, POSIX

Python versions

?

Programming Model

APSW is a SQLite 3 wrapper that provides a thin layer over SQLite 3. Although APSW looks vaguely similar to the DBAPI, it is not compliant with that API and instead mirrors the way SQLite 3 works.

Comments

Supported Python Applications

• Thuban (GIS application)
• Roundup (issue tracker)
• PyPI (Python Package Index)
• Trac (issue tracker, wiki, Subversion web frontend)
• Cloud Wiki (wiki)
• Supybot (IRC bot framework)

• PyAddbook (Address Book)

Pros

I think SQLite may be a good replacement for gadfly, because:

• the main engine is written in C, so it should be faster than the gadfly implementation in Python
• it's extensible in a very easy way via Python
• it doesn't put all data in memory like gadfly does (yet you can do that if you want, just use ':memory:' as filename
• It's very cool for small databased application, because you do not have to start an external DBMS
• Implements almost all of SQL92

Cons

• SQLite only supports the basic types NULL, INTEGER, FLOAT, TEXT and BLOB
• If you want to use other types like DATE and TIME in pysqlite, you need to use its "pysqlite types mode", where things can get a little nastier.

Usage Notes

The following solution was difficult to discover with the available documentation (http://pysqlite.org/ was unavailable). If this page can be found by others searching for answers, it may save many hours of frustration.

Id of Most Recent Row

After creating a new row in a table that uses AUTOINCREMENT to create the PRIMARY KEY, one may wish to determine the value of the new row-id, for example if the value is need for a new row in a related table that will be inserted next. The answer is to use the lastrowid property of the cursor class as in newId=c.lastrowid  shown below in a demo context. Tested in Python2.5.1 with the sqlite3 module:

           import sqlite3
           con = sqlite3.connect('demo.db')
           con.execute("""CREATE TABLE tbl (
               id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT,
               grp INTEGER)""")
           c = con.cursor()
           c.execute("""INSERT INTO tbl (grp) VALUES (0);""")

           newId = c.lastrowid

           print "New rowid =", newId
           c.close()
           con.close()

The result is printed: New rowid = 1