Common ways to connect to odbc from python on windows? [closed]

Question

What library should I use to connect to odbc from python on windows? Is there a good alternative for pywin32 when it comes to odbc?

I'm looking for something well-documented, robust, actively maintained, etc. pyodbc looks good -- are there any others?

Answer 1

You already suggested pyodbc, and I am going to agree with you.

It has given me the least amount of issues in my experience; I've used pymssql and adodbapi, and when those threw exceptions/created issues, I swapped out the code and replaced it with pyodbc and it either fixed the problem, or gave better error messages so I could debug faster.

It's worth mentioning that I primarily use it to connect to MSSQL Server DBs.

Answer 2

I use SQLAlchemy for all python database access. I highly recommend SQLAlchemy.

SA uses pyodbc under the hood when connecting to SQL server databases. It uses other DBAPI libraries to connect to other database, for instance cx_Oracle.

A simplistic example, using SQLAlchemy like you would normally use a DBAPI module:

import sqlalchemy  engine = sqlalchemy.create_engine('sqlite:///database.db') for r in engine.execute('SELECT * FROM T'):     print(r.OneColumn, r.OtherColumn) 

But the real value of SQLAlchemy lies in its ORM and SQL expression language. Have a look, it is well worth the effort to learn to use.