database wrapper ?

[Stef Mientki]

hello,

Until now I used a simple wrapper around pysqlite and pyodbc to manage
my databases.
Now I'm looking for a better solution,
because I've to support a (for this moment) unknown database,
and I'm not the one who will choose the database.

Googling, I found SQLalchemy,
which looks quit good.

But as I only want to choose once,
I googled for "SQLalchemy alternatives",
but it didn't find many answers.
(Storm / Grok are of no interest, because manipulating the structure of
the database is a key issue).

Is SQLalchemy the best / most popular database wrapper ?
Are there any alternatives ?

I don't know if it matters:
but for the short term it's only for desktop applications,
but in the future I'll certainly want to move to web based databases.

thanks,
Stef

 

[andrew cooke]

Is SQLalchemy the best / most popular database wrapper ?

SQLAlchemy is the best SQL library I have ever used.

But it may depend on who you ask. For me, what makes SQLAlchemy so
good is the way it allows you to use SQL from within Python. I have
used the ORM side, and that's fine, but it's the way that it doesn't
get in the way of "just" SQL that make it so good. If I had to choose
a second reason why it's so good it would be the way it emphasises
metadata - it will use table definitions from the database, and it
will let you define schema yourself (in fact, it's an excellent way of
defining complex schema in a platform-independent fashion).

The main drawback is that it is rather complex. If something doesn't
work, it can be tricky to work out why. On the other hand, the
documentation is good, and the support (on google groups) is good too
(a developer always replies within 24 hours in my experience).

It does expect you to know SQL - it doesn't try to hide SQL at all.
Whether that is good or bad depends on your POV I guess.

I wish all DB solutions were like this - my hope is that EmpireDB will
do the same for Java, but it's too early to tell...

Andrew

 

[andrew cooke]

I wish all DB solutions were like this - my hope is that EmpireDB will
do the same for Java, but it's too early to tell...

Hmmm - I should correct the above. I had assumed EmpireDB was new,
because it's an Apache Incubator project, but now I look at their site
I see it's actually been around for years. I need to try it out...

Sorry about the error,
Andrew