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4 documentation

12.6. sqlite3 — DB-API 2.0 interface for

SQLite databases
Source code: Lib/sqlite3/

SQLite is a C library that provides a lightweight disk-based database that doesn’t require a
separate server process and allows accessing the database using a nonstandard variant of
the SQL query language. Some applications can use SQLite for internal data storage. It’s also
possible to prototype an application using SQLite and then port the code to a larger database
such as PostgreSQL or Oracle.

The sqlite3 module was written by Gerhard Häring. It provides a SQL interface compliant with
the DB-API 2.0 specification described by PEP 249.

To use the module, you must first create a Connection object that represents the database.
Here the data will be stored in the example.db file:

import sqlite3
conn = sqlite3.connect('example.db')

You can also supply the special name :memory: to create a database in RAM.

Once you have a Connection , you can create a Cursor object and call its execute() method
to perform SQL commands:

c = conn.cursor()

# Create table
c.execute('''CREATE TABLE stocks
(date text, trans text, symbol text, qty real, price real)''')

# Insert a row of data

c.execute("INSERT INTO stocks VALUES ('2006-01-05','BUY','RHAT',100,35.14)")

# Save (commit) the changes

conn.commit()

# We can also close the connection if we are done with it.

# Just be sure any changes have been committed or they will be lost.
conn.close()

The data you’ve saved is persistent and is available in subsequent sessions:

import sqlite3
conn = sqlite3.connect('example.db')
c = conn.cursor()

Usually your SQL operations will need to use values from Python variables. You shouldn’t
assemble your query using Python’s string operations because doing so is insecure; it makes

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your program vulnerable to an SQL injection attack (see https://xkcd.com/327/ for humorous
example of what can go wrong).

Instead, use the DB-API’s parameter substitution. Put ? as a placeholder wherever you want
to use a value, and then provide a tuple of values as the second argument to the cursor’s
execute() method. (Other database modules may use a different placeholder, such as %s or
:1 .) For example:

# Never do this -- insecure!

symbol = 'RHAT'
c.execute("SELECT * FROM stocks WHERE symbol = '%s'" % symbol)

# Do this instead
t = ('RHAT',)
c.execute('SELECT * FROM stocks WHERE symbol=?', t)
print(c.fetchone())

# Larger example that inserts many records at a time

purchases = [('2006-03-28', 'BUY', 'IBM', 1000, 45.00),
('2006-04-05', 'BUY', 'MSFT', 1000, 72.00),
('2006-04-06', 'SELL', 'IBM', 500, 53.00),
]
c.executemany('INSERT INTO stocks VALUES (?,?,?,?,?)', purchases)

To retrieve data after executing a SELECT statement, you can either treat the cursor as an
iterator, call the cursor’s fetchone() method to retrieve a single matching row, or call
fetchall() to get a list of the matching rows.

This example uses the iterator form:

>>>
>>> for row in c.execute('SELECT * FROM stocks ORDER BY price'):
print(row)

('2006-01-05', 'BUY', 'RHAT', 100, 35.14)

('2006-03-28', 'BUY', 'IBM', 1000, 45.0)
('2006-04-06', 'SELL', 'IBM', 500, 53.0)
('2006-04-05', 'BUY', 'MSFT', 1000, 72.0)

See also:

https://github.com/ghaering/pysqlite
The pysqlite web page – sqlite3 is developed externally under the name “pysqlite”.
https://www.sqlite.org
The SQLite web page; the documentation describes the syntax and the available data
types for the supported SQL dialect.
http://www.w3schools.com/sql/
Tutorial, reference and examples for learning SQL syntax.
PEP 249 - Database API Specification 2.0
PEP written by Marc-André Lemburg.

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12.6.1. Module functions and constants

sqlite3. version
The version number of this module, as a string. This is not the version of the SQLite
library.

sqlite3. version_info
The version number of this module, as a tuple of integers. This is not the version of the
SQLite library.

sqlite3. sqlite_version
The version number of the run-time SQLite library, as a string.

sqlite3. sqlite_version_info
The version number of the run-time SQLite library, as a tuple of integers.

sqlite3. PARSE_DECLTYPES
This constant is meant to be used with the detect_types parameter of the connect()
function.

Setting it makes the sqlite3 module parse the declared type for each column it returns.
It will parse out the first word of the declared type, i. e. for “integer primary key”, it will
parse out “integer”, or for “number(10)” it will parse out “number”. Then for that column, it
will look into the converters dictionary and use the converter function registered for that
type there.

sqlite3. PARSE_COLNAMES
This constant is meant to be used with the detect_types parameter of the connect()
function.

Setting this makes the SQLite interface parse the column name for each column it
returns. It will look for a string formed [mytype] in there, and then decide that ‘mytype’ is
the type of the column. It will try to find an entry of ‘mytype’ in the converters dictionary
and then use the converter function found there to return the value. The column name
found in Cursor.description is only the first word of the column name, i. e. if you use
something like 'as "x [datetime]"' in your SQL, then we will parse out everything until
the first blank for the column name: the column name would simply be “x”.

sqlite3. connect(database[, timeout, detect_types, isolation_level, check_same_thread,

factory, cached_statements, uri])
Opens a connection to the SQLite database file database. You can use ":memory:" to
open a database connection to a database that resides in RAM instead of on disk.

When a database is accessed by multiple connections, and one of the processes

modifies the database, the SQLite database is locked until that transaction is committed.
The timeout parameter specifies how long the connection should wait for the lock to go

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away until raising an exception. The default for the timeout parameter is 5.0 (five
seconds).

For the isolation_level parameter, please see the isolation_level property of

Connection objects.

SQLite natively supports only the types TEXT, INTEGER, REAL, BLOB and NULL. If you
want to use other types you must add support for them yourself. The detect_types
parameter and the using custom converters registered with the module-level
register_converter() function allow you to easily do that.

detect_types defaults to 0 (i. e. off, no type detection), you can set it to any combination of
PARSE_DECLTYPES and PARSE_COLNAMES to turn type detection on.

By default, check_same_thread is True and only the creating thread may use the
connection. If set False , the returned connection may be shared across multiple threads.
When using multiple threads with the same connection writing operations should be
serialized by the user to avoid data corruption.

By default, the sqlite3 module uses its Connection class for the connect call. You can,
however, subclass the Connection class and make connect() use your class instead by
providing your class for the factory parameter.

Consult the section SQLite and Python types of this manual for details.

The sqlite3 module internally uses a statement cache to avoid SQL parsing overhead. If
you want to explicitly set the number of statements that are cached for the connection,
you can set the cached_statements parameter. The currently implemented default is to
cache 100 statements.

If uri is true, database is interpreted as a URI. This allows you to specify options. For
example, to open a database in read-only mode you can use:

db = sqlite3.connect('file:path/to/database?mode=ro', uri=True)

More information about this feature, including a list of recognized options, can be found in
the SQLite URI documentation.

Changed in version 3.4: Added the uri parameter.

sqlite3. register_converter(typename, callable)

Registers a callable to convert a bytestring from the database into a custom Python type.
The callable will be invoked for all database values that are of the type typename. Confer
the parameter detect_types of the connect() function for how the type detection works.
Note that the case of typename and the name of the type in your query must match!

sqlite3. register_adapter(type, callable)

Registers a callable to convert the custom Python type type into one of SQLite’s
supported types. The callable callable accepts as single parameter the Python value, and
must return a value of the following types: int, float, str or bytes.
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sqlite3. complete_statement(sql)
Returns True if the string sql contains one or more complete SQL statements terminated
by semicolons. It does not verify that the SQL is syntactically correct, only that there are
no unclosed string literals and the statement is terminated by a semicolon.

This can be used to build a shell for SQLite, as in the following example:

# A minimal SQLite shell for experiments

import sqlite3

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
con.isolation_level = None
cur = con.cursor()

buffer = ""

print("Enter your SQL commands to execute in sqlite3.")

print("Enter a blank line to exit.")

while True:
line = input()
if line == "":
break
buffer += line
if sqlite3.complete_statement(buffer):
try:
buffer = buffer.strip()
cur.execute(buffer)

if buffer.lstrip().upper().startswith("SELECT"):
print(cur.fetchall())
except sqlite3.Error as e:
print("An error occurred:", e.args[0])
buffer = ""

con.close()

sqlite3. enable_callback_tracebacks(flag)
By default you will not get any tracebacks in user-defined functions, aggregates,
converters, authorizer callbacks etc. If you want to debug them, you can call this function
with flag set to True . Afterwards, you will get tracebacks from callbacks on sys.stderr .
Use False to disable the feature again.

12.6.2. Connection Objects

class sqlite3. Connection
A SQLite database connection has the following attributes and methods:

isolation_level
Get or set the current isolation level. None for autocommit mode or one of
“DEFERRED”, “IMMEDIATE” or “EXCLUSIVE”. See section Controlling Transactions
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for a more detailed explanation.

in_transaction
True if a transaction is active (there are uncommitted changes), False otherwise.
Read-only attribute.

New in version 3.2.

cursor(factory=Cursor)
The cursor method accepts a single optional parameter factory. If supplied, this must
be a callable returning an instance of Cursor or its subclasses.

commit()
This method commits the current transaction. If you don’t call this method, anything
you did since the last call to commit() is not visible from other database connections.
If you wonder why you don’t see the data you’ve written to the database, please
check you didn’t forget to call this method.

rollback()
This method rolls back any changes to the database since the last call to commit() .

close()
This closes the database connection. Note that this does not automatically call
commit() . If you just close your database connection without calling commit() first,
your changes will be lost!

execute(sql[, parameters])
This is a nonstandard shortcut that creates a cursor object by calling the cursor()
method, calls the cursor’s execute() method with the parameters given, and returns
the cursor.

executemany(sql[, parameters])
This is a nonstandard shortcut that creates a cursor object by calling the cursor()
method, calls the cursor’s executemany() method with the parameters given, and
returns the cursor.

executescript(sql_script)
This is a nonstandard shortcut that creates a cursor object by calling the cursor()
method, calls the cursor’s executescript() method with the given sql_script, and
returns the cursor.

create_function(name, num_params, func)

Creates a user-defined function that you can later use from within SQL statements
under the function name name. num_params is the number of parameters the
function accepts (if num_params is -1, the function may take any number of
arguments), and func is a Python callable that is called as the SQL function.

The function can return any of the types supported by SQLite: bytes, str, int, float and
None .
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Example:

import sqlite3
import hashlib

def md5sum(t):
return hashlib.md5(t).hexdigest()

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
con.create_function("md5", 1, md5sum)
cur = con.cursor()
cur.execute("select md5(?)", (b"foo",))
print(cur.fetchone()[0])

create_aggregate(name, num_params, aggregate_class)

Creates a user-defined aggregate function.

The aggregate class must implement a step method, which accepts the number of
parameters num_params (if num_params is -1, the function may take any number of
arguments), and a finalize method which will return the final result of the
aggregate.

The finalize method can return any of the types supported by SQLite: bytes, str,
int, float and None .

Example:

import sqlite3

class MySum:
def __init__(self):
self.count = 0

def step(self, value):

self.count += value

def finalize(self):
return self.count

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
con.create_aggregate("mysum", 1, MySum)
cur = con.cursor()
cur.execute("create table test(i)")
cur.execute("insert into test(i) values (1)")
cur.execute("insert into test(i) values (2)")
cur.execute("select mysum(i) from test")
print(cur.fetchone()[0])

create_collation(name, callable)
Creates a collation with the specified name and callable. The callable will be passed
two string arguments. It should return -1 if the first is ordered lower than the second,
0 if they are ordered equal and 1 if the first is ordered higher than the second. Note

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that this controls sorting (ORDER BY in SQL) so your comparisons don’t affect other
SQL operations.

Note that the callable will get its parameters as Python bytestrings, which will
normally be encoded in UTF-8.

The following example shows a custom collation that sorts “the wrong way”:

import sqlite3

def collate_reverse(string1, string2):

if string1 == string2:
return 0
elif string1 < string2:
return 1
else:
return -1

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
con.create_collation("reverse", collate_reverse)

cur = con.cursor()
cur.execute("create table test(x)")
cur.executemany("insert into test(x) values (?)", [("a",), ("b",)])
cur.execute("select x from test order by x collate reverse")
for row in cur:
print(row)
con.close()

To remove a collation, call create_collation with None as callable:

con.create_collation("reverse", None)

interrupt()
You can call this method from a different thread to abort any queries that might be
executing on the connection. The query will then abort and the caller will get an
exception.

set_authorizer(authorizer_callback)
This routine registers a callback. The callback is invoked for each attempt to access a
column of a table in the database. The callback should return SQLITE_OK if access is
allowed, SQLITE_DENY if the entire SQL statement should be aborted with an error
and SQLITE_IGNORE if the column should be treated as a NULL value. These
constants are available in the sqlite3 module.

The first argument to the callback signifies what kind of operation is to be authorized.
The second and third argument will be arguments or None depending on the first
argument. The 4th argument is the name of the database (“main”, “temp”, etc.) if
applicable. The 5th argument is the name of the inner-most trigger or view that is
responsible for the access attempt or None if this access attempt is directly from input
SQL code.

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Please consult the SQLite documentation about the possible values for the first
argument and the meaning of the second and third argument depending on the first
one. All necessary constants are available in the sqlite3 module.

set_progress_handler(handler, n)
This routine registers a callback. The callback is invoked for every n instructions of
the SQLite virtual machine. This is useful if you want to get called from SQLite during
long-running operations, for example to update a GUI.

If you want to clear any previously installed progress handler, call the method with
None for handler.

Returning a non-zero value from the handler function will terminate the currently
executing query and cause it to raise an OperationalError exception.

set_trace_callback(trace_callback)
Registers trace_callback to be called for each SQL statement that is actually
executed by the SQLite backend.

The only argument passed to the callback is the statement (as string) that is being
executed. The return value of the callback is ignored. Note that the backend does not
only run statements passed to the Cursor.execute() methods. Other sources
include the transaction management of the Python module and the execution of
triggers defined in the current database.

Passing None as trace_callback will disable the trace callback.

New in version 3.3.

enable_load_extension(enabled)
This routine allows/disallows the SQLite engine to load SQLite extensions from
shared libraries. SQLite extensions can define new functions, aggregates or whole
new virtual table implementations. One well-known extension is the fulltext-search
extension distributed with SQLite.

Loadable extensions are disabled by default. See [1].

New in version 3.2.

import sqlite3

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")

# enable extension loading

con.enable_load_extension(True)

# Load the fulltext search extension

con.execute("select load_extension('./fts3.so')")

# alternatively you can load the extension using an API call:

# con.load_extension("./fts3.so")

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# disable extension loading again

con.enable_load_extension(False)

# example from SQLite wiki

con.execute("create virtual table recipe using fts3(name, ingredients)"
con.executescript("""
insert into recipe (name, ingredients) values ('broccoli stew', 'br
insert into recipe (name, ingredients) values ('pumpkin stew', 'pum
insert into recipe (name, ingredients) values ('broccoli pie', 'bro
insert into recipe (name, ingredients) values ('pumpkin pie', 'pump
""")
for row in con.execute("select rowid, name, ingredients from recipe whe
print(row)

load_extension(path)
This routine loads a SQLite extension from a shared library. You have to enable
extension loading with enable_load_extension() before you can use this routine.

Loadable extensions are disabled by default. See [1].

New in version 3.2.

row_factory
You can change this attribute to a callable that accepts the cursor and the original
row as a tuple and will return the real result row. This way, you can implement more
advanced ways of returning results, such as returning an object that can also access
columns by name.

Example:

import sqlite3

def dict_factory(cursor, row):

d = {}
for idx, col in enumerate(cursor.description):
d[col[0]] = row[idx]
return d

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
con.row_factory = dict_factory
cur = con.cursor()
cur.execute("select 1 as a")
print(cur.fetchone()["a"])

If returning a tuple doesn’t suffice and you want name-based access to columns, you
should consider setting row_factory to the highly-optimized sqlite3.Row type. Row
provides both index-based and case-insensitive name-based access to columns with
almost no memory overhead. It will probably be better than your own custom
dictionary-based approach or even a db_row based solution.

text_factory

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Using this attribute you can control what objects are returned for the TEXT data type.
By default, this attribute is set to str and the sqlite3 module will return Unicode
objects for TEXT . If you want to return bytestrings instead, you can set it to bytes .

You can also set it to any other callable that accepts a single bytestring parameter
and returns the resulting object.

See the following example code for illustration:

import sqlite3

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
cur = con.cursor()

AUSTRIA = "\xd6sterreich"

# by default, rows are returned as Unicode

cur.execute("select ?", (AUSTRIA,))
row = cur.fetchone()
assert row[0] == AUSTRIA

# but we can make sqlite3 always return bytestrings ...

con.text_factory = bytes
cur.execute("select ?", (AUSTRIA,))
row = cur.fetchone()
assert type(row[0]) is bytes
# the bytestrings will be encoded in UTF-8, unless you stored garbage i
# database ...
assert row[0] == AUSTRIA.encode("utf-8")

# we can also implement a custom text_factory ...

# here we implement one that appends "foo" to all strings
con.text_factory = lambda x: x.decode("utf-8") + "foo"
cur.execute("select ?", ("bar",))
row = cur.fetchone()
assert row[0] == "barfoo"

total_changes
Returns the total number of database rows that have been modified, inserted, or
deleted since the database connection was opened.

iterdump()
Returns an iterator to dump the database in an SQL text format. Useful when saving
an in-memory database for later restoration. This function provides the same
capabilities as the .dump command in the sqlite3 shell.

Example:

# Convert file existing_db.db to SQL dump file dump.sql

import sqlite3

con = sqlite3.connect('existing_db.db')
with open('dump.sql', 'w') as f:
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for line in con.iterdump():

f.write('%s\n' % line)

12.6.3. Cursor Objects

class sqlite3. Cursor
A Cursor instance has the following attributes and methods.

execute(sql[, parameters])
Executes an SQL statement. The SQL statement may be parameterized (i. e.
placeholders instead of SQL literals). The sqlite3 module supports two kinds of
placeholders: question marks (qmark style) and named placeholders (named style).

Here’s an example of both styles:

import sqlite3

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
cur = con.cursor()
cur.execute("create table people (name_last, age)")

who = "Yeltsin"
age = 72

# This is the qmark style:

cur.execute("insert into people values (?, ?)", (who, age))

# And this is the named style:

cur.execute("select * from people where name_last=:who and age=:age", {

print(cur.fetchone())

execute() will only execute a single SQL statement. If you try to execute more than
one statement with it, it will raise a Warning . Use executescript() if you want to
execute multiple SQL statements with one call.

executemany(sql, seq_of_parameters)
Executes an SQL command against all parameter sequences or mappings found in
the sequence seq_of_parameters. The sqlite3 module also allows using an iterator
yielding parameters instead of a sequence.

import sqlite3

class IterChars:
def __init__(self):
self.count = ord('a')

def __iter__(self):
return self

def __next__(self):
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if self.count > ord('z'):

raise StopIteration
self.count += 1
return (chr(self.count - 1),) # this is a 1-tuple

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
cur = con.cursor()
cur.execute("create table characters(c)")

theIter = IterChars()
cur.executemany("insert into characters(c) values (?)", theIter)

cur.execute("select c from characters")

print(cur.fetchall())

Here’s a shorter example using a generator:

import sqlite3
import string

def char_generator():
for c in string.ascii_lowercase:
yield (c,)

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
cur = con.cursor()
cur.execute("create table characters(c)")

cur.executemany("insert into characters(c) values (?)", char_generator(

cur.execute("select c from characters")

print(cur.fetchall())

executescript(sql_script)
This is a nonstandard convenience method for executing multiple SQL statements at
once. It issues a COMMIT statement first, then executes the SQL script it gets as a
parameter.

sql_script can be an instance of str .

Example:

import sqlite3

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
cur = con.cursor()
cur.executescript("""
create table person(
firstname,
lastname,
age
);

create table book(

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title,
author,
published
);

insert into book(title, author, published)

values (
'Dirk Gently''s Holistic Detective Agency',
'Douglas Adams',
1987
);
""")

fetchone()
Fetches the next row of a query result set, returning a single sequence, or None when
no more data is available.

fetchmany(size=cursor.arraysize)
Fetches the next set of rows of a query result, returning a list. An empty list is
returned when no more rows are available.

The number of rows to fetch per call is specified by the size parameter. If it is not
given, the cursor’s arraysize determines the number of rows to be fetched. The
method should try to fetch as many rows as indicated by the size parameter. If this is
not possible due to the specified number of rows not being available, fewer rows may
be returned.

Note there are performance considerations involved with the size parameter. For
optimal performance, it is usually best to use the arraysize attribute. If the size
parameter is used, then it is best for it to retain the same value from one
fetchmany() call to the next.

fetchall()
Fetches all (remaining) rows of a query result, returning a list. Note that the cursor’s
arraysize attribute can affect the performance of this operation. An empty list is
returned when no rows are available.

close()
Close the cursor now (rather than whenever __del__ is called).

The cursor will be unusable from this point forward; a ProgrammingError exception
will be raised if any operation is attempted with the cursor.

rowcount
Although the Cursor class of the sqlite3 module implements this attribute, the
database engine’s own support for the determination of “rows affected”/”rows
selected” is quirky.

For executemany() statements, the number of modifications are summed up into

rowcount .

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As required by the Python DB API Spec, the rowcount attribute “is -1 in case no
executeXX() has been performed on the cursor or the rowcount of the last operation
is not determinable by the interface”. This includes SELECT statements because we
cannot determine the number of rows a query produced until all rows were fetched.

With SQLite versions before 3.6.5, rowcount is set to 0 if you make a DELETE FROM
table without any condition.

lastrowid
This read-only attribute provides the rowid of the last modified row. It is only set if you
issued an INSERT or a REPLACE statement using the execute() method. For
operations other than INSERT or REPLACE or when executemany() is called,
lastrowid is set to None .

If the INSERT or REPLACE statement failed to insert the previous successful rowid is
returned.

Changed in version 3.6: Added support for the REPLACE statement.

arraysize
Read/write attribute that controls the number of rows returned by fetchmany() . The
default value is 1 which means a single row would be fetched per call.

description
This read-only attribute provides the column names of the last query. To remain
compatible with the Python DB API, it returns a 7-tuple for each column where the
last six items of each tuple are None .

It is set for SELECT statements without any matching rows as well.

connection
This read-only attribute provides the SQLite database Connection used by the
Cursor object. A Cursor object created by calling con.cursor() will have a
connection attribute that refers to con:

>>> con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:") >>>

>>> cur = con.cursor()
>>> cur.connection == con
True

12.6.4. Row Objects

class sqlite3. Row
A Row instance serves as a highly optimized row_factory for Connection objects. It tries
to mimic a tuple in most of its features.

It supports mapping access by column name and index, iteration, representation, equality
testing and len() .

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If two Row objects have exactly the same columns and their members are equal, they
compare equal.

keys()
This method returns a list of column names. Immediately after a query, it is the first
member of each tuple in Cursor.description .

Changed in version 3.5: Added support of slicing.

Let’s assume we initialize a table as in the example given above:

conn = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
c = conn.cursor()
c.execute('''create table stocks
(date text, trans text, symbol text,
qty real, price real)''')
c.execute("""insert into stocks
values ('2006-01-05','BUY','RHAT',100,35.14)""")
conn.commit()
c.close()

Now we plug Row in:

>>>
>>> conn.row_factory = sqlite3.Row
>>> c = conn.cursor()
>>> c.execute('select * from stocks')
<sqlite3.Cursor object at 0x7f4e7dd8fa80>
>>> r = c.fetchone()
>>> type(r)
<class 'sqlite3.Row'>
>>> tuple(r)
('2006-01-05', 'BUY', 'RHAT', 100.0, 35.14)
>>> len(r)
5
>>> r[2]
'RHAT'
>>> r.keys()
['date', 'trans', 'symbol', 'qty', 'price']
>>> r['qty']
100.0
>>> for member in r:
... print(member)
...
2006-01-05
BUY
RHAT
100.0
35.14

12.6.5. Exceptions
exception sqlite3. Warning
A subclass of Exception .
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exception sqlite3. Error

The base class of the other exceptions in this module. It is a subclass of Exception .

exception sqlite3. DatabaseError

Exception raised for errors that are related to the database.

exception sqlite3. IntegrityError

Exception raised when the relational integrity of the database is affected, e.g. a foreign
key check fails. It is a subclass of DatabaseError .

exception sqlite3. ProgrammingError

Exception raised for programming errors, e.g. table not found or already exists, syntax
error in the SQL statement, wrong number of parameters specified, etc. It is a subclass of
DatabaseError .

12.6.6. SQLite and Python types

12.6.6.1. Introduction

SQLite natively supports the following types: NULL , INTEGER , REAL , TEXT , BLOB .

The following Python types can thus be sent to SQLite without any problem:

SQLite
Python type type
None NULL
int INTEGER
float REAL
str TEXT
bytes BLOB

This is how SQLite types are converted to Python types by default:

SQLite type Python type

NULL None
INTEGER int
REAL float
TEXT depends on text_factory , str by default
BLOB bytes

The type system of the sqlite3 module is extensible in two ways: you can store additional
Python types in a SQLite database via object adaptation, and you can let the sqlite3 module
convert SQLite types to different Python types via converters.

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12.6.6.2. Using adapters to store additional Python types in SQLite

databases
As described before, SQLite supports only a limited set of types natively. To use other Python
types with SQLite, you must adapt them to one of the sqlite3 module’s supported types for
SQLite: one of NoneType, int, float, str, bytes.

There are two ways to enable the sqlite3 module to adapt a custom Python type to one of
the supported ones.

12.6.6.2.1. Letting your object adapt itself

This is a good approach if you write the class yourself. Let’s suppose you have a class like
this:

class Point:
def __init__(self, x, y):
self.x, self.y = x, y

Now you want to store the point in a single SQLite column. First you’ll have to choose one of
the supported types first to be used for representing the point. Let’s just use str and separate
the coordinates using a semicolon. Then you need to give your class a method
__conform__(self, protocol) which must return the converted value. The parameter
protocol will be PrepareProtocol .

import sqlite3

class Point:
def __init__(self, x, y):
self.x, self.y = x, y

def __conform__(self, protocol):

if protocol is sqlite3.PrepareProtocol:
return "%f;%f" % (self.x, self.y)

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
cur = con.cursor()

p = Point(4.0, -3.2)
cur.execute("select ?", (p,))
print(cur.fetchone()[0])

12.6.6.2.2. Registering an adapter callable

The other possibility is to create a function that converts the type to the string representation
and register the function with register_adapter() .

import sqlite3

class Point:
def __init__(self, x, y):
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self.x, self.y = x, y

def adapt_point(point):
return "%f;%f" % (point.x, point.y)

sqlite3.register_adapter(Point, adapt_point)

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
cur = con.cursor()

p = Point(4.0, -3.2)
cur.execute("select ?", (p,))
print(cur.fetchone()[0])

The sqlite3 module has two default adapters for Python’s built-in datetime.date and
datetime.datetime types. Now let’s suppose we want to store datetime.datetime objects
not in ISO representation, but as a Unix timestamp.

import sqlite3
import datetime
import time

def adapt_datetime(ts):
return time.mktime(ts.timetuple())

sqlite3.register_adapter(datetime.datetime, adapt_datetime)

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
cur = con.cursor()

now = datetime.datetime.now()
cur.execute("select ?", (now,))
print(cur.fetchone()[0])

12.6.6.3. Converting SQLite values to custom Python types

Writing an adapter lets you send custom Python types to SQLite. But to make it really useful
we need to make the Python to SQLite to Python roundtrip work.

Enter converters.

Let’s go back to the Point class. We stored the x and y coordinates separated via semicolons
as strings in SQLite.

First, we’ll define a converter function that accepts the string as a parameter and constructs a
Point object from it.

Note: Converter functions always get called with a bytes object, no matter under which
data type you sent the value to SQLite.

def convert_point(s):
x, y = map(float, s.split(b";"))
return Point(x, y)
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Now you need to make the sqlite3 module know that what you select from the database is
actually a point. There are two ways of doing this:

Implicitly via the declared type

Explicitly via the column name

Both ways are described in section Module functions and constants, in the entries for the
constants PARSE_DECLTYPES and PARSE_COLNAMES .

The following example illustrates both approaches.

import sqlite3

class Point:
def __init__(self, x, y):
self.x, self.y = x, y

def __repr__(self):
return "(%f;%f)" % (self.x, self.y)

def adapt_point(point):
return ("%f;%f" % (point.x, point.y)).encode('ascii')

def convert_point(s):
x, y = list(map(float, s.split(b";")))
return Point(x, y)

# Register the adapter

sqlite3.register_adapter(Point, adapt_point)

# Register the converter

sqlite3.register_converter("point", convert_point)

p = Point(4.0, -3.2)

#########################
# 1) Using declared types
con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:", detect_types=sqlite3.PARSE_DECLTYPES)
cur = con.cursor()
cur.execute("create table test(p point)")

cur.execute("insert into test(p) values (?)", (p,))

cur.execute("select p from test")
print("with declared types:", cur.fetchone()[0])
cur.close()
con.close()

#######################
# 1) Using column names
con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:", detect_types=sqlite3.PARSE_COLNAMES)
cur = con.cursor()
cur.execute("create table test(p)")

cur.execute("insert into test(p) values (?)", (p,))

cur.execute('select p as "p [point]" from test')

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print("with column names:", cur.fetchone()[0])

cur.close()
con.close()

12.6.6.4. Default adapters and converters

There are default adapters for the date and datetime types in the datetime module. They will
be sent as ISO dates/ISO timestamps to SQLite.

The default converters are registered under the name “date” for datetime.date and under
the name “timestamp” for datetime.datetime .

This way, you can use date/timestamps from Python without any additional fiddling in most
cases. The format of the adapters is also compatible with the experimental SQLite date/time
functions.

The following example demonstrates this.

import sqlite3
import datetime

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:", detect_types=sqlite3.PARSE_DECLTYPES|sqlite3

cur = con.cursor()
cur.execute("create table test(d date, ts timestamp)")

today = datetime.date.today()
now = datetime.datetime.now()

cur.execute("insert into test(d, ts) values (?, ?)", (today, now))

cur.execute("select d, ts from test")
row = cur.fetchone()
print(today, "=>", row[0], type(row[0]))
print(now, "=>", row[1], type(row[1]))

cur.execute('select current_date as "d [date]", current_timestamp as "ts [time

row = cur.fetchone()
print("current_date", row[0], type(row[0]))
print("current_timestamp", row[1], type(row[1]))

If a timestamp stored in SQLite has a fractional part longer than 6 numbers, its value will be
truncated to microsecond precision by the timestamp converter.

12.6.7. Controlling Transactions

By default, the sqlite3 module opens transactions implicitly before a Data Modification
Language (DML) statement (i.e. INSERT / UPDATE / DELETE / REPLACE ).

You can control which kind of BEGIN statements sqlite3 implicitly executes (or none at all) via
the isolation_level parameter to the connect() call, or via the isolation_level property of
connections.

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If you want autocommit mode, then set isolation_level to None .

Otherwise leave it at its default, which will result in a plain “BEGIN” statement, or set it to one
of SQLite’s supported isolation levels: “DEFERRED”, “IMMEDIATE” or “EXCLUSIVE”.

The current transaction state is exposed through the Connection.in_transaction attribute

of the connection object.

Changed in version 3.6: sqlite3 used to implicitly commit an open transaction before DDL
statements. This is no longer the case.

12.6.8. Using sqlite3 efficiently

12.6.8.1. Using shortcut methods

Using the nonstandard execute() , executemany() and executescript() methods of the

Connection object, your code can be written more concisely because you don’t have to
create the (often superfluous) Cursor objects explicitly. Instead, the Cursor objects are
created implicitly and these shortcut methods return the cursor objects. This way, you can
execute a SELECT statement and iterate over it directly using only a single call on the
Connection object.

import sqlite3

persons = [
("Hugo", "Boss"),
("Calvin", "Klein")
]

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")

# Create the table

con.execute("create table person(firstname, lastname)")

# Fill the table

con.executemany("insert into person(firstname, lastname) values (?, ?)", perso

# Print the table contents

for row in con.execute("select firstname, lastname from person"):
print(row)

print("I just deleted", con.execute("delete from person").rowcount, "rows")

12.6.8.2. Accessing columns by name instead of by index

One useful feature of the sqlite3 module is the built-in sqlite3.Row class designed to be
used as a row factory.

Rows wrapped with this class can be accessed both by index (like tuples) and case-
insensitively by name:

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import sqlite3

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
con.row_factory = sqlite3.Row

cur = con.cursor()
cur.execute("select 'John' as name, 42 as age")
for row in cur:
assert row[0] == row["name"]
assert row["name"] == row["nAmE"]
assert row[1] == row["age"]
assert row[1] == row["AgE"]

12.6.8.3. Using the connection as a context manager

Connection objects can be used as context managers that automatically commit or rollback
transactions. In the event of an exception, the transaction is rolled back; otherwise, the
transaction is committed:

import sqlite3

con = sqlite3.connect(":memory:")
con.execute("create table person (id integer primary key, firstname varchar un

# Successful, con.commit() is called automatically afterwards

with con:
con.execute("insert into person(firstname) values (?)", ("Joe",))

# con.rollback() is called after the with block finishes with an exception, th

# exception is still raised and must be caught
try:
with con:
con.execute("insert into person(firstname) values (?)", ("Joe",))
except sqlite3.IntegrityError:
print("couldn't add Joe twice")

12.6.9. Common issues

12.6.9.1. Multithreading

Older SQLite versions had issues with sharing connections between threads. That’s why the
Python module disallows sharing connections and cursors between threads. If you still try to
do so, you will get an exception at runtime.

The only exception is calling the interrupt() method, which only makes sense to call from a
different thread.

Footnotes

[1] (1, 2) The sqlite3 module is not built with loadable extension support by default,
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because some platforms (notably Mac OS X) have SQLite libraries which are compiled
without this feature. To get loadable extension support, you must pass –enable-
loadable-sqlite-extensions to configure.

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